Abstract
Modality is an important grammatical expression which finds its expression in the editorial section of newspapers in Pakistan. Firstly, this paper deals with the analysis of “Modals” in English and highlights their nature and function. Secondly, it reports on which modal verbs are commonly used by the editors. Thirdly, it is focused on how the modal verbs in Pakistani English newspapers are used to manipulate readers’ opinion towards specific issues. For this purpose, a corpus of two Pakistani English newspapers: The Dawn and The News, equally divided by editors, was analyzed wielding concordance tool. The comparative analysis of these newspapers revealed that both the editors chose mainly predictive auxiliary modals such as will and would to the other types of modal. The predictive modal for The News suggested that prediction about the future “what will/would happen” was the major apprehension of the editorial writers. On the other hand, comparing the modals of obligation in the two newspapers, The Daily Dawn was more focused on solution—what should be done.
Highlights
Newspaper editorials have significant importance in newspaper genre
This paper deals with the analysis of “Modals” in English and highlights their nature and function. It reports on which modal verbs are commonly used by the editors. It is focused on how the modal verbs in Pakistani English newspapers are used to manipulate readers’ opinion towards specific issues
The analysis focused on the percentage of the number of modal verbs employed in each of the two groups of newspapers to get at: (i) the type of modals the editors use to the maximum; (ii) the newspaper which exploits more modal of same type than the other; (iii) and the modals the editors exploit keeping in view their peculiar function in order to steer the readers’ ideology to their favorite directions
Summary
Newspaper editorials have significant importance in newspaper genre. A newspaper presumes that there is always only one reasonable point of view on any matter presented to the public. Fowler (1991) points out that newspaper editorial offering values and beliefs and employ textual strategies i.e., modality is the main concern of this study. The term modality has been observed as a way to express attitudes of the speaker or writer towards the world. Kiefer (1994) looked at the modality on the “relativisation of the authenticity of statement meanings to a set of possible words” or the mirror through which public can see the world to be diverse. Modality permits to the language users to express what is, what would be, what may be, and what should be. Modality can give liberty to language speakers to state what is, what would be, what may be, and what should be. By using the syntactical modal patterns, language speakers employ modality to make assessment about prospects and to accomplish the requirement of cross-linguistic description (Palmer, 2007)
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