SELF-MENTIONS AS INTERACTIONAL META-DISCOURSE IN PAKISTANI ENGLISH NEWSPAPER EDITORIALS: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY

Abstract

This study examines self-mentions as interactional discourse markers in Pakistani English newspaper editorials, specifically emphasizing the functional differentiation between inclusive and exclusive 'we.' Using Hyland’s interactional metadiscourse model, the analysis employs a mixed-methods approach to investigate how editorial writers manage authorial presence, reader identity, and institutional stance. The corpus consists of 150 editorials published between November and December 2025 in three prominent Pakistani English newspapers: DAWN, The News, and Express Tribune, ensuring equal representation across publications and addressing both national and international topics. The editorials were collected from publicly accessible web sources, and frequencies and concordances of first-person self-references, encompassing I, me, my, mine, we, our, ourselves, and myself, were obtained using AntConc, and quantitative analysis was enhanced by qualitative functional interpretation. The results indicate that self-mentions are typically rare in Pakistani English newspaper editorials, highlighting the genre's institutional character. The exclusive use of "we" prevails in all three journals, largely serving to assert authority, convey evaluation, or uphold editorial distance; nonetheless, the Express Tribune exhibits a relatively greater frequency of self-references that indirectly engage readers and evoke a sense of shared social obligation. The traces of inclusive “we” are prevailing in the news, while overall it has the least number of self-mentions, the Dawn has the second position in overall distribution. These findings demonstrate systematic variance in editorial procedures and reader orientation among newspapers. This study enhances metadiscourse research by applying Hyland’s paradigm to Pakistani English editorial discourse and illustrating that the presence and exclusion of self-mentions are more accurately seen as a functional continuum instead of formal grammatical categories.