GENDERED LEXICAL CHOICES IN ENGLISH NEWSPAPERS: A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF REPRESENTATION OF FEMALE POLITICIANS IN PAKISTAN

Abstract

This study investigates the discursive positioning of female politicians in two of the most prominent English-language newspapers in Pakistan, Dawn and The News and how this positioning is achieved through the repetition of lexical and collocational patterns. While feminist studies on political language have documented its gendering in the West and South Asia (Lazar, 2005; Cameron, 2021), corpora-oriented research focusing specifically on the Pakistani English-language journalism corpus is scarce. This study was conducted through a purpose-built corpus consisting of 41 news articles from two newspapers, namely Dawn (20 articles) and The News (21 articles), covering top female political leaders such as Maryam Nawaz, Benazir Bhutto and Hina Rabbani Khar. These articles totaled 27083 running words. By means of word-frequency profiling and collocational analysis of the 4 target lemmas women, right(s), empower, and feminist, corpus-assisted discourse analysis was applied. The collocate networks and the frequency list were produced following standard procedures in corpus software, similar to those used for logDice- and likelihood-based extraction. The findings revealed that the strongest association was with representation, with women associating these constructions with constructions of empowerment, seats, tickets, legislators, and reserved, pointing to a discourse more about quota politics and procedural inclusion than substantive agency and policy-making. The collocate she used yielded a negative effect size, indicating underuse of the word compared to expectations, and rights were mainly associated with human, inheritance and property, placing women’s rights at a legal rather than a political level. Empower, in turn, collocated with protect, digital, financial, and laws, foregrounding protectiveness and instrumentalisation over agency in the case of the first, and bringing back a narrow, infrequent collection of academic collocates (zones, pedagogies, intersectional) rather than collocates from political journalism. The results reveal that press discourse in English in Pakistan presents female politicians as visible objects, mainly in the language of quotas and protection, rather than in an agentive political register, which has traditionally been the domain of male politicians. The study contributes to the larger body of literature on language, gender and political legitimacy from a Pakistan’s perspective supported by a corpus-based approach.