A GENRE-BASED ANALYSIS OF ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS CAMPAIGNS IN PAKISTANI ENGLISH NEWSPAPERS: EXPLORING COMMUNICATIVE PURPOSES

Abstract

This study examines the communicative function of the environmental awareness campaign articles in the Pakistani English newspapers & how the communicative function is linguistically realized in the articles. Although there is a growing interest in the field of genre analysis and environmental media discourse, there is a lack of research on this functionally complex genre in the Pakistani English press, which is crucial in view of the rising environmental crisis faced by Pakistan and the impact of the discourse in the print media such as Dawn and Express Tribune. This study is conducted using qualitative research design and the corpus consists of Twenty-five environmental awareness campaign articles (12 from Dawn and 13 from Express Tribune) published in 2025 and then analyzed systematically in all seven stages of genre analysis. The results reveal a communicative function with four operating concurrently: Informational, Persuasive, Critical, Evaluative and Advocacy-oriented. They are achieved by the systematic use of deontic and epistemic modality, evaluative language, transitivity patterns and nominalization. Institutional analysis further reveals that while both newspapers produce texts belonging to the same genre, their distinct editorial identities generate measurably different lexico-grammatical profiles: Dawn favors forensic evaluative language, retrospective deontic modality, and nominalization of institutional failure, whereas Express Tribune employs emotively charged lexis, present-directed advocacy modality, and amplificatory nominalization. These findings confirm Bhatia's (1993) theoretical claim that institutional context gives genre its character and integrity, and offer the first empirically grounded genre-analytic account of environmental awareness campaign discourse within the Pakistani English press.