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Critical Discourse Analysis of PM Imran Khan's Twitter Messages On Covid-19
Critical Discourse Analysis of PM Imran Khan's Twitter Messages On Covid-19
Chapter 1. Introduction
1.1 Background
From the last two decades, technological development is playing a crucial role in every field of
life. Social networking or social media tools such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube etc playing
their academic or non-academic role. One of the social media tools or micro-blogging, Twitter,
since from its arrival is playing a great role. It has influenced media, news, politics,
entertainment, sports etc. They are using it in providing information worldwide. People tweets
and interact with others by words and conversation using hashtag (#) to highlight their topics.
This tool is enormously used by the leaders in this critical period of time where social distancing
is banned. This is the heart-rending time of pandemic covid-19 (corona virus disease-2019)
which has affected millions of people's life in all over the world and millions have kicked their
bucket with this fatal or deadly disease because of this novel Corona virus that it has no
previous history and no vaccine. In this critical period, this virus has incited a great panic on the
globe and every single person wants to seek help and guidance from their leaders' words to
fight this disease.
Language is the key element to communicate with other, shows emotions, understand
the attitudes, and to express the ideas. The systematic functional language (SFL) is an
approach described by Michael Halliday for discourse analysis. Systemic Functional Linguistics
(SFL), the theory of language used in the study. SFL is a social semiotic theory that investigates
discourse in context. In SFL, language has its three meta-function at semantic level. Ideational,
Interpersonal and textual function.
How social media tool is presenting the ideology of the leader to persuade the mass to
fight against the covid-19?
To what extent this tool is useful for authentic information from the leader to convince n
themselves to stay home and stay safe.
Terminology:
Twitter:
Twitter is an American microblogging and social networking service on which users
post and interact with messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and
retweet the tweets
Twitter’s Hashtag:
Hash tag (#) used in the tweet describes the topic or the theme. According to
Zappavigna, it is a meta data, means it is the subject of the main body of the tweet.
In this chapter, we will discuss the design of the research study, how data is collected and which
method or analytical framework will be used for analysis.
3.2 Delimitation:
Halliday’s model semantics part is consisted of three meta-functions;
Ideational
It is concerned with the existing reality of the world with the participants, process and
circumstances
interpersonal
It is the interaction between the participants in spoken or written text.
textual function
It is related to the construction of text i.e. how it is held together (cohesion)
but the present study is delimited to Ideational function, which follows transitivity and its
process types
3.3 Data Collection and sampling
The research paper is based on twitter messages(tweets) of political leader, PM Imran khan, on
Corona virus disease-2019 (Covid-19). Only tweets are collected for the analysis, the replies of
these tweets will not be included in the study.
Chapter 4. Findings and Discussion
Corona virus outbreak effects the lives of millions. Many people have to lose their jobs and
families are struggling to keep themselves away from poverty. In this critical period, when our
motherland also hit by its stroke, PM Imran khan is trying to keep away the countrymen from the
panic condition while tweeting his post and making the positive relation between people of
Pakistan by giving pieces of advice and also trying to giving relief.
Ideational meta-function:
The main component of ideational function of language is transitivity. Transitivity belongs
to the experiential and logical modes. It represents these number of aspects.
Transitivity
Participant (human/non-human) who are participating in the process
Process (verb or action)
Circumstances (process occur / when, where and how it takes place)
(circumstance)In the open glade the(participant) wild rabbits(process) danced with their
shadows(circumstance)
Transitivity process is further divided into six types with the participants
The following figure (fig.1) describing the six types of process in detail
Here are a few tweets of PM Imran Khan on the pandemic disease Covid-19
1. I am saddened by the news of the death of countless Pakistanis
living & working abroad who have fallen victim to the
COVID19. Many died while serving in the frontline of the
global war against COVID19. My condolences & prayers go
their families
10:04 AM · Apr 17, 2020
Mental process:
Material process
Verbal process
Relational process
Mental process
Discussion:
is consist of the clause which has two process types. One is mental and the other is
material. The mental process is further described by, the cognition, which means sender
in the clause is emotionally but cognitively affected. It is one of the mental process
components.
This clause is verbal clause because the participant is sayer and he is saying or conveying
(process) the message to the mass (people). They are verbal beneficiary in this clause.
This tweet is consisting of two clauses but according to its function, it has three
types of process relational, mental and material. In relational process we have
carrier or attribute. So, the attributive clause we have Is
Pakistani health professionals are on the frontline in the fight
against #COVID19 across the world.
Hash tag# words for an instance in the above attributive clause indicating the
topic or subject of the tweet.
This tweet has mental as well as material process. Mental process has
cognition ‘want’, ‘think’ and perception ‘to observe’. It has temporal
conjunction ‘first’ and the agent which is recognized with the ‘ by’ phrase
in the clause we have found.
References