FORENSIC LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF FAKE NEWS IN PAKISTANI ENGLISH NEWSPAPERS: A CORPUS-ASSISTED CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20964886Keywords:
Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Fake News, LancsBox, Pakistani English NewspapersAbstract
The growing dissemination of fake news has emerged as a serious issue of media credibility and people’s trust in Pakistan. In this study, the presence of linguistic features of fake news in Pakistani English newspapers was explored through Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (CACDA). The newspaper articles (2020–2025) from The Dawn and The Nation were searched in #Lancs Box 6.0.1, yielding a corpus of 300 articles. The analysis focused on frequency, keywords, collocations, lexical bundles, concordance lines, the presence of modals, and social actors via representation. The results reveal that fake news discourse exhibits typical lexical patterns, persuasive modality, and the strategic use of collocation, which are combined to create ideology and credibility. These linguistic features are identified through Fairclough’s (1989) Three-Dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis and reflect how deceptive news narratives affect public perception. The study advances the fields of corpus linguistics, media discourse research, and misinformation research by showing how corpus linguistics can be used effectively in conjunction with CDA.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Sadaf Rashid, Muhammad Kamran Abbas Ismail (Author)
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