English lexical and grammatical preferences in framing media discourse

Abstract

This paper is a corpus-based analysis of English newspaper reportage of eight South Asian countries: Pakistan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. The objective of the study is to analyse lexico-grammatical patterns between the crime press reportage (CRR) of South Asian countries and explore how they are similar to or different from each other in reporting crime. To achieve this objective, three English newspapers from each country were selected and a specialized corpus was compiled which was analysed with reference to the five textual dimensions introduced by Biber (1992 & 2006). This research is significant as there is hardly any study that attempted to find the differences and similarities between the Englishes used in South Asian countries. The comparison indicates that CRR of all the South Asian countries are significantly different from each other in producing informational, explicit, non-argumentative, and abstract discourse. Moreover, while most of the South Asian countries vary in producing narrative discourse, Afghanistan produces non-narrative discourse. The results provided substantial evidence that the English used in each South Asian country counts as a distinct variety.