TRANSITIVITY ANALYSIS OF BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILES OF PAKISTANI POLITICIANS IN PAKISTANI ENGLISH NEWSPAPERS
Keywords:
Biographical Profiles, Media Discourse, Pakistani Political Discourse, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Transitivity AnalysisAbstract
The study analyses Halliday and Matthiessen’s Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL) model to identify how language functions in biographical profiles of Pakistani politicians that are published in English Newspapers. The corpus for this study includes three biographical profiles, namely, the profile of Javed Hashmi in Dawn, the profile of Hakim Ali Zardari in Dawn and the profile of Salman Taseer in Daily Times. These texts are divided into thirty-six independent clauses and each of these clauses is analyzed for six process types, namely Material, Mental, Relational, Verbal, Behavioural and Existential. The analysis is done by using detailed, clause-level tables where parties, circumstances, and ideological interpretation are identified for each clause. The most frequent processes are the material processes (38.9%), which highlight the politicians as actors whose actions form national history. The study draws on specific concepts from Fairclough (1995, 2015)- especially naturalisation and ideological importation — and Van Dijk (2008)- particularly macro-semantic generalisation and ideological square —to explain how transitivity patterns help in reproducing the dominant embedded ideologies. The results show that the genre of biographical profile is a place for the process of identity construction and that it is grammatically ideologically determinative. This study adds to the existing body of knowledge of SFL-based media discourse analysis in the under-researched South Asian context and its implications for media literacy, critical language awareness pedagogy and political communications studies in Pakistan.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Breera Tahir, Sidra Nawaz, Dr. Hafiz Muhammad Qasim (Author)
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