Corpus-Driven approaches to the representation of Pakistani Culture in Newspapers’ blogs
Abstract
Blogs have become a notable part of online communication culture. They have grown into a massive communication tool of various themes prevailing in society and ultimately represent culture. Blogging allows people to be a part of a substantial communication system. Blogs facilitate researchers in bringing out cultural diversity and practices of masses of a region. The present study explored the representation of Pakistani culture through blogs. Pakistani bloggers used different lexical items to portray the culture of Pakistan. The data for this study has been collected from the blogs published in 2016 and 2017 in two different English online newspapers of Pakistan, The Express Tribune, and The Dawn through purposive sampling. The data comprised of 48,513 words. Hofstede’s (1991) Onion Model provided the foundation of this study. This study explored the different layers and themes of Pakistani culture in blogs and provided a platform for readers to know about the culture of Pakistan. This study is both quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative method dealt with numerical data i.e. wordlist (number of words related to themes) and collocates (number of collocates) while the qualitative method dealt with collocation in context. The corpus was cleaned through an online text fixer and analyzed through two corpus tools named Antconc and Lanxbox. Antconc helped us in compiling the wordlist and exploring its collocates and Lanxbox was used to explore the relationship of node words with different lexical items. The findings of the study reveal various themes related to Pakistani culture like women’s sufferings and killings, child abuse, students’ politics within Pakistani universities, the superiority of English over Urdu, jirgas injustice, vicious spending’s on Eid ul Azha, lifafa culture on eid ul fitar, Pakistani feminocentric dramas, inequality in marriage certificates, dowry and so on. It is hoped that this study would help national as well as international community of scholars in understanding various layers of the culture of Pakistan.
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