Corpus-Driven Critical Discourse Analysis of Pakistani Newspaper Opinion Articles on Healthcare

Abstract

The mass media determines the opinion of public and involves in setting the agenda for public discourse. Media, in this regard, plays a pivotal role as a tool in shapping and portraying public thinking and orientation. Media discourse, specifically, has invisible powers to exercise, identify, and report various socio-cultural issues in order to build mass opinion. The current study focuses on finding the themes extracted from concordance lines and collocates of the content words of the male and female corpus of healthcare newspaper opinion articles published in Pakistani newspapers. These healthcare articles were collected from different newspapers from 2018 to 2023. So to achieve this goal, the corpus-driven critical discourse analysis of 34 newspaper opnion articles written by females and 46 newspaper opinion articles written by males on healthcare were selected for this study. A total corpus size of 70,288 words was collected. Various themes having different ideologies were found such as issues of mental and physical health, provision and negligence of healthcare facilities, causes of mental health, healthcare system and working of government, the need for accountability of medical services, obstacles for women in accessing healthcare, the mental health of women, maternal health of women, the influence of government’s negligence on health of women, attitude of women towards medical services and impact of Covid-19 on the health sector of Pakistan. We conclude that mental health, women's health, healthcare facilities, and government approach towards healthcare are under consideration in newspaper opinion articles.

Keywords: healthcare Newspaper articles, corpus-driven, critical discourse analysis, Pakistan,