Portrayal of Power in the Headlines of Pakistani English Newspapers: A Pragmatic Stylistic Analysis

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In the current information era, media texts serve two purposes: they convey information and also shape public opinion by generating pertinent discourse in response to the demands of specific interest groups. To make readers avoid taking media texts at face value necessitates a critical investigation. However, since these texts are complex and require multi-perspectivism, an interdisciplinary study becomes necessary (Hansen, 2011; Klein, 2004). By combining two domains, Black (2006) constructed a pragmatic stylistic framework that enables reading between the lines and decipher the subtleties of the produced texts. The current study employs Black's (2006) Pragmatic Stylistic framework to identify linguistic and stylistic strategies, as well as to investigate how language resources are manipulated and used as a tool to depict the interplay of power relations based on position, authority, or situation. The data for the current pursuit includes 30 front-page headlines from The Daily Dawn and The News International, while the data analysis process is based on the analytical paradigm of descriptive qualitative interpretation. The study's findings show that pragmatic stylistic aspects play an important role in establishing and maintaining power relations in newspaper headlines. They support the notion that linguistic resources are used to influence readers' perceptions of the reported event while also implicitly projecting newsmakers' ideology.