LINGUISTIC AND IDEOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF HONOUR, SHAME, AND MODESTY IN PAKISTANI ENGLISH-LANGUAGE NEWSPAPERS: A CORPUS-ASSISTED SOCIOLINGUISTIC AND CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF GENDERED PATRIARCHAL SOCIALIZATION ANALYSIS

Abstract

This paper explores the linguistic and ideological processes of defining honour, shame, and modesty in the Pakistani newspapers that use English language and how these three moral constructs lead to the gendered socialization of patriarchy. Honour, shame and modesty are very strong moral controls, especially in the context of Pakistani socio-culture, which governs women and their social value behaviour. The methodology underpinning the research is the fact that newspapers, as an authoritative institution of the population, centralizes the normalized gender norms, focusing on the use of routine language instead of their direct ideological proclamation. The approach of the study is the corpus-assisted sociolinguistic and Critical Discourse Analytical (CDA) research based on the three-dimensional model by Fairclough, feminist sociolinguistics, and corpus-assisted discourse studies as the theoretical perspective. The period of the data collection covered the years 2018-25 and included the top Pakistani English-language newspapers (Dawn, The News International, and The Express Tribune). A specialized corpus was built through the use of purposive and stratified sampling which included news reports, editorials, opinion pieces and crime/court reporting. The main tool of data analysis was AntConc, which was used to perform frequency, keyword, collocation, concordance, and transitivity analyses. The results show that honour, shame and modesty are part of a complex moral system that unfairly targets women, obscures the agency of the male and justifies the entitlement of the patriarch. The research paper comes to the conclusion that English-language newspapers in Pakistan play an active role in internalizing and naturalizing the gender norms of patriarchy by using repetition patterns of language.