INVESTIGATING POLITICAL IDEOLOGY IN ENGLISH AND URDU NEWSPAPER EDITORIALS A CORPUS-BASED COMPARATIVE STUDY

Abstract

The analysis in this study is corpus-based comparative analysis of the ways in which political ideology is expressed in English and Urdu newspaper editorials.  The main objective is to look at the ideological thoughts in the linguistic decisions of the editorial discourse of specific newscast.  The analysis based on corpus linguistic analysis such as AntConc to construct corpus based on linguistic patterns such as lexical patterns, collocations, concordances, and discourse prosody through constructing two similar corpora of editorials in English and Urdu, published in leading national dailies.  The analysis views the conceptualization of the ingrained ideology in language use through the theoretical standpoint of critical discourse analysis (CDA).  Focusing on the issues of political stance, evaluative language, and framing methods, the analysis aims at emphasizing the similarities and differences in the ideological alignment of the English and Urdu journalistic text. It is hoped that the findings will help prove the effectiveness of language in changing the choice of opinion and political belonging of masses in the context of multilingual media.  This study emphasizes the cross-linguistic and cultural factors of ideological representation of the Pakistani print media, and contributes to the fields of corpus linguistics, media discourse, and sociolinguistics.