Linguistic Representation of 100 Days of Pakistan Tehreek - e - Insaaf in Online Pakistani Newspapers: A Critical Discourse Analysis & Systematic Functional Linguistic Perspective

Abstract

Politics in the world have become mediatized and the language of actors and their party’s holders are represented by newspapers by their own ideological factors. The newspaper language has emerged through speech, beliefs and writing practices [20]. To determine the meaning behind the text of Pakistani newspapers, the theory of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by Norman Fairclough (1995) is employed on hard news of ‘Dawn’ as an independent newspaper and on ‘The News’ as a mainstream newspaper of Pakistan. The online newspapers are selected for data selection on 100 days performance in 2018 of Pakistan Tehreek - e - Insaaf (PTI) on specified date 29th November 2018 on coverage of 100 days event based on social actors’ performance as ‘doer’, which comprises of two news reports having 5,276 words. Imran Khan’s and his party holders’ speeches on the party’s performance on 100 days completion of government is taken as a unit for analysis, which is represented in both newspapers differently. The social actors’ selection is based on a socio-semiotic approach by van Leeuwen (2005). The social actors in the existing study are ‘Pakistan Tehreek – e – Insaaf (PTI)’ and ‘Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz (PML-N)’. The Systematic Functional Linguistics tool by Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (2014) is applied to media text for determining the role of social actors by process types as an analytical tool, which is based on the revised work of Matthiessen. ‘Dawn’ has portrayed happening as a hard news while in contrast, ‘The News’ compared PTI performance with PML-N with suggestions.