Framing Pakistani Religious Minorities Through Linguistic Choices in Pakistani and International Newspapers: A Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Study

Abstract

In this study, Pakistani religious minorities are examined in the discourse of Pakistani and international newspapers as a Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) study. This study selects the newspaper articles from Dawn (National Pakistani Newspaper), Express Tribune (Hybrid, National and International Newspaper), and Al Jazeera English (International Newspaper) with a purposive sampling method over a period from 2020 to 2024, which will be analyzed using the LancsBox software with frequency analysis, keyword analysis, collocation analysis, and concordance line analysis. The theoretical framework is based on van Dijk’s ideological square, and this helps to analyze the positive self-presentation, negative other-presentation, inclusion, exclusion and polarization in the media texts. The investigation is structured by two overarching research questions that discusses the kind of collocations of key identity terms that build up divergent ideological connections within the three newspaper corpora, and highlights who gets to be heard and who does not in congruent lines of agency related to religious minority groups. This paper also examines the dominant lexical and semantic patterns in the tri-source corpus, to analyze collocational networks and interpret their ideological associations, and to compare discursive strategies and emergent thematic patterns in the tri-source corpus based on van Dijk's ideological square. The portrayal of minorities in Pakistani newspapers is done in a way that makes them appear as weak and vulnerable citizens whose constitutional rights are being violated, while at the same time portraying the state by using passive constructions and lexical mitigation. By contrast, Al Jazeera applies a human rights perspective, which makes minorities in Pakistan global actors who have been the victim of systematic abuse. This research adds to the increasingly strong Corpus-Assisted CDA research literature and provides a practically sound approach to analyzing minority representation in the media in the South Asian context. 

Keywords: Corpus-Assisted CDA, religious minorities, Pakistan, media discourse, ideological framing, van Dijk, LancsBox, collocation analysis.