Transitivity Patterns in British and Pakistani Election News Reporting: A Comparative Analysis of the Guardian and Dawn

Abstract

This study examines transitivity patterns in British and Pakistani election news reporting through a comparative corpus-based analysis of the Guardian and Dawn. The study is grounded in Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2013) Systemic Functional Linguistics, particularly the transitivity system, which explains how language represents experience through processes, participants, and circumstances. The main purpose of the study is to identify and compare the frequency of six transitivity process types namely material, mental, relational, verbal, behavioural, and existential in selected election news reports from the two newspapers. The corpus consisted of 1388 clauses from Dawn and 2297 clauses from the Guardian, making a total of 3685 clauses. Each clause was analyzed and classified according to its dominant process type. The findings revealed that material processes were the most frequent in both newspapers, with 731 occurrences in Dawn and 1005 occurrences in the Guardian. Relational processes ranked second in both corpora, followed by mental and verbal processes, while behavioural and existential processes appeared with the lowest frequencies. The results show that election news reporting in both Pakistani and British contexts is mainly action-oriented, as political events, actors, and electoral developments are largely represented through actions and happenings. However, proportional differences indicate that Dawn relied more on material and verbal processes, whereas the Guardian used more relational, mental, and existential processes. The study concludes that transitivity analysis is a useful linguistic tool for comparing political news discourse across different media and cultural contexts.