The syntax and lexical cohesion in the media statements of Hezbollah’s military arm

Issuing media statements, particularly in sensitive situations, such as the military contexts, stipulates not only opting certain words, but also forming syntactic structures align with the aim of the producer. In the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, militant organisations, such as Hezbollah's military arm, "The Islamic Resistance", issue media statements to the public include details about their military activities. However, these statements are written carefully, because it is assumed that the readers are not limited to the followers and the supporters. To understand the syntax of the issued media statements by militant organisations in the Middle East, this paper sheds the light on the syntactic structures of statements issued by the media unit of Hezbollah's military arm. In utilising linguistics as an approach, this paper provides an insight about the grammatical structure of the statements in Arabic and their English translation. Thus, the paper shows an example of the corpus linguistics of a news lead extracted from a statement in Arabic and its English translation to sketch the shifts in the sentence. In showing the significance of the linguistic choices for the producer, the paper illuminates on the lexical cohesion in the statements, because they play a role in the representation of 'the self' and 'the other.' The result of the paper, which considers archival data in the analysis, shows how the syntactic structure plays a role in framing. In this regard, this paper sheds the focus light on the significance of studying syntax and lexical cohesion to understand the media discourse of militant organisations in the Middle East.