THE CORPUS-BASED APPROACH TO CROSS-CULTURAL GENRE ANALYSIS OF PAKISTANI AND AMERICAN NEWS REPORTS: A PROJECT IN COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS

Abstract

The present study is an attempt to conduct a genre analysis of Pakistani and American news reports at micro and macro levels. The data for the current research has been collected from the corpus of news reports of Pakistani and American English newspapers (The Dawn and The News from Pakistani newspapers and The New York Times and The Washington Post from American newspapers). Simple random sampling has been used as a sampling technique. For the analytical approach, Bhatia’s (1993) model has been used which consists of seven steps. The array of viewpoints on grammar, sociocognition and cultural description provided by Bhatia (1993) serves as a key framework for the interpretation of textual informative actions. The findings of the study reveal that there are certain similarities and differences between the move structures of English news reports while the communication goals of English news reports from two different types of newspapers are identical. The general communicative purpose of both news reports is similar. The recurring moves that appear in news reports from Pakistan and America primarily strive to provoke details or conditions regarding: real events, explaining available options for events or optional strategies, offering additional viewpoints, reflecting the authors’ preferred events and provide suggestions about how to respond to real-world situations which shows relation to the communicating purpose of the genre found in English news reports from America and Pakistan.