Pakistan’s Water Challenges: A Systemic Functional Analysis of Dawn and The News International Editorials

Abstract

This paper draws a comparison between Dawn and The News through Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) in an attempt to identify how linguistic decisions used frame the water scarcity problems faced by Pakistan. The paper will be based on the metafunction framework developed by Halliday (1994) to analyze theme-rheme structures and transitivity processes in 10 editorials published between 2024 to 2025. A mixed-method approach was used, with a qualitative textual analysis being used alongside quantitative frequencies of marked and unmarked themes and process types. The results indicate that Dawn focuses on systemic change and institutional accountability, whereas The News accentuates human agency and accountability. Such language patterns show how grammatical forms encode ideology and the means through which the public can be informed about national matters, which can be applied to the study of media literacy, journalism, and discourse.

Keywords: Thematic Analysis, Transitivity, Ideological Framing, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Media Discourse.