Modality in Pakistani and British Media Discourse: A Corpus-Assisted Study of Editorials in Dawn and the Guardian

Abstract

Modal verbs are used to construe an important grammatical expression called modality, which has its various shades in almost every newspaper. Modality is considered of extreme importance in media discourse. This paper presents the comparative study of modal verbs in Dawn, an English Pakistani newspaper, and Guardian, a British English newspaper. For this investigation, a corpus was designed using an equal number of editorials from both the newspapers and the analysis was carried out using Antconc, a corpus tool. The analysis revealed that Guardian editorial writers use a greater number of predictive modal verbs like will and would. On the other hand, Dawn editorial writers use a greater number of obligatory modal verbs like must and should. Also, the editorial writers of Dawn use a higher number of modal verbs like may and might to express possibility and ability.