Portraying Disaster in Pakistani Urdu and English Newspapers: A Comparative Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Study

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the portrayal of disasters in Pakistani English and Urdu newspapers through Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (Baker, 2008; Fillmore, 1982). For this study, 50 articles containing the term disaster were collected from the official website of Dawn and 50 articles mentioning آفات were collected from the official website of Daily Pakistan. To determine the ideology portrayed by the term disaster and آفات in the Dawn and Daily Pakistan, certain ideological indicators such as, adjectives, pronouns, and modal verbs associated with them were identified through Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1982), Van Dijk’s Ideological Polarization, and Dichotomy of Modal Verbs by Quirk and Greenbaum (2000) respectively using Sketch Engine software (Sketch Engine, n.d.). The findings of the study have unveiled that both corpora frame the same social issue as a tragedy: revealing biases. Moreover, the frequent use of modal verbs: can, must, and should, reflects the urgency of acting, showing severity. Furthermore, the use of pronouns formulates us, and them form an in-group and an out-group. Overall, the tragedy is portrayed as a progressive ideology in both corpora.