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Title COVERAGE OF BREXIT IN PAKISTANI ENGLISH NEWSPAPERS: A CORPUS-ASSISTED CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Author(s) AZIZ ULLAH

Abstract The exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union in the historic referendum of 23rd June 2016 is a landmark event given coverage not only in media of the UK and the EU but also in the media from the rest of the world. The linguistic construction of this politicohistorical event in world media is going to be ideologically motivated as per the interest of their respective countries. In the orientation of Pakistani media, this study examines the Brexit event linguistically. However, to-date, a few studies, but not in the field of linguistics and mass media, have attempted a thorough investigation of Brexit in relation to Pakistan. This study in hand attempts to linguistically examine Pakistani media coverage of Brexit. This study combines two methodological perspectives, namely, Corpus Linguistics (CL) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to identify the construction of Brexit event in the corpora compiled from the three selected Pakistani English newspapers i.e. the Dawn, the News International and the Express Tribune within a defined timeframe (23rd June 2016 to 29th March 2019). Three corpus tools i.e. keyword list, collocates and concordance were mainly used through lexical software AntConc in order to achieve the objectives of the study. Keyword list was manipulated in order to know the ‘aboutness’ of the compiled individual corpus. Collocates was exploited to identify repeated collocate patterns around a word of interest, and concordance was effective and useful in close reading of a collocate pattern in context. In addition, collocate patterns in concordances were interpreted through S tubbs’ discourse prosody and Galtung and Ruge’s theory of news values to trace the vested policy of the individual newspapers. The selected newspapers were found to have uniformly constructed the Brexit matter as a negative event and reflected it as a transnational issue specifically in terms of its impact on Pakistan and the EU states. Nevertheless, the newspapers highlighted Brexit in very less positive way as a freedom for Britain in trade across the world. Pakistan was portrayed as the affectee of Brexit by the newspapers but at the same time in optimistic light in terms of better trade relations in the post-Brexit era.

Type Thesis/Dissertation MS

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2021-02-17

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