A Deictic Analysis of Pakistan’s National Identity Representation in the Indigenous English Newspapers

Abstract

The goal set for the present study is to investigate the temporal and spatial deixis which are used to represent and build the national identity of Pakistan in the two leading indigenous English newspapers. The study investigates how the WAR and NATION frames are used in the opinion articles of The News and DAWN to project the negative image of Pakistan by using temporal and spatial deixis. The data collection is based on the ten years of opinion articles from 2007–2017. The political situation of Pakistan in the year 2007 was crucial and it is marked as a step towards the revival of civilian democracy through the announcement of general election in Pakistan during the ongoing war on terror. Purposive sampling technique is used in the selection of data. The theoretical foundation is based on the Anderson’s (1991) Imagined community. The empirical framework is based on Harts’ (2014) Critical Cognitive Discourse Analysis. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed. Antconc is used to generate the frequencies and concordance lines of the text. The data analysis shows that journalists mostly projected the negative image of Pakistan by utilizing different deixis and by linking the events of past from shared memories with the present and the future events by conceptualizing WAR and NATION Frames.