DISCURSIVE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN CRIME NEWS STORIES OF PAKISTANI ENGLISH PRINT MEDIA

Abstract

Media are a powerful source that reflects and mirrors societal attitude to culture. It also constructs and reconstructs our approaches and ideological inclinations. Pakistani media hold mirror up to the cultural influence on ideas and thoughts. The present study endeavors to explore the representation of women victims in crime news stories in Pakistani English newspapers. Data were collected from widely read main stream English newspapers and pragmatic approach was used to analyze linguistic choices which represent women. To analyze media discourse, Mill’s approach of Feminist Stylistics was used along with Corpus Linguistics. Data were quantified with the help of corpus software WMatrix (Rayson, 2008) to discover the frequency of lexical choices being used to represent women. The findings reveal that the female victims were mostly asymmetrically constructed and they were chiefly described in term of their age, social and marital status