Comparative Analysis Of Circumstantial Elements In Crime News Reports From Dawn And Express Tribune

Abstract

This research aims to determine the significance of circumstantial elements in the representation of news discourse. In this regard, a Systemic Functional Analysis of the crime reports from two Pakistani English newspapers, Dawn and The Express Tribune,is conductedemploying Halliday's (2004; 2014) model of Systemic Functional Grammar.The focus of the study is on circumstantial elements due to their significance in the field of systemic functional linguistics. Circumstantial features are often regarded as structurally peripheral parts of the clause, but they play a vital role in contributing to the context of any clause in a particular text. Two hundred crime news event reports from two newspapers namely Dawn and The Express Tribuneare [1]selected as datato demonstrate how circumstantial elements in news texts are used to represent, frame, clarify, or exaggerate the crime event. The UAM Corpus tool is used for data analysis. Ant-Conc. Software is used to cross-verify the occurrences of features coded through the UAM Corpus Tool.  At the end of the analysis of each news report, a comparative analysis of crime event reports from newspapers; Dawn and The Express Tribune is carried out to find out the difference of representation with reference to the utilization of circumstances. The objective of the study is to observe how the newspapers employ circumstantial choices to represent the news event; and how the absence of these contextual features in the representation of a crime event affects the depiction of a crime event. This study is also an effort to draw the attention of common readers of the newspapers to the new way of perceiving and analyzing the language of the newspapers.The findings of the research displayed that Dawncrime news reports designated every single detail of participants, time, date cause, and scenario of the crime scene revealing a focus mainly on detailed context including temporal, spatial locations, cause, matter, source, and situation of the crime scenes. Contrarily,Express Tribune focused just on delivering a crime report instead of adding complete context and details. By highlighting the importance of contextual elements, this study has analyzed the media discourse by using a very comprehensive approach.