PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF CNN HEADLINES REPRESENTING PAKISTAN

Abstract

Current study investigates the pragmatic and linguistic devices used in CNN headlines on the subjects of crises and political unrest in Pakistan. The study argues that in addition to the news coverage headlines also have pragmatically encoded meanings. The research is quite significant as the representation of Pakistan in the cyber media headlines has not yet been studied. Moreover, the selected period ranging from January 2010 to May 2011 covers a series of important events including political turmoil, terrorist activities, flood disaster, religious controversies, death of Osama Bin Laden and estranged diplomatic ties with the United States of America. All these events were subject to constant media debate, especially on CNN, a news channel available to two billion people worldwide. Quantitative as well as qualitative descriptive methods were applied to analyze and discuss the news headlines. The results indicate that Osama Bin Laden, militancy in Pakistan and US Pak diplomatic ties were commonly found topics in the headlines. The results also indicate that the representatives are the most frequently found illocutionary acts in the data as compared with the expressives, directives and commissives. The study finds that the headlines have variety of other illocutionary functions closely related to these acts. The study also finds that the linguistic devices not only help the headlines to function as speech acts but also help the headline writers to shape the news events in multiple ways. It has been identified that using these devices a number of features such as urgency and topicality, emphasis, emotional sense, metaphorical meanings, idiomatic connotations and irony have been incorporated in the headlines