Empowering Iraqi women on online media: a corpus pragmatic study

Abstract Women’s empowerment is defined as fostering women’s self-esteem and their ability to make their own decisions to affect societal change for themselves and for healthy communities. This study aims to examine the language of online media that aims to boost Iraqi women’s empowerment from a corpus pragmatic perspective. The study particularly seeks to investigate the linguistic strategies and dominant language patterns that focus on the empowerment theme. It attempts to shed light on the field of corpus pragmatics as suggested by O’Keeffe et al. (2020) to portray the empowerment of Iraqi women on online media. Corpus pragmatics is a recent linguistic field that integrates pragmatics and corpus tools to study various texts. The data have been compiled from various websites that are concerned with human rights and sustainable development issues. The findings show that media discourse represents Iraqi women’s empowerment as a future plan. The studied media is associated with inviting language patterns toward achieving this goal. The media encourages and reflects plans for this unaccomplished goal to achieve societal change.