Cognitive-Semantic Representation of Crimes Against Women in Pakistani English Newspapers: A Relevance-Theoretic Analysis

Abstract

Lexical, syntactic and semantic choices in the act of reporting crime do more than just convey facts; they shape the way readers think about violence, victims and perpetrators. While the media research in Pakistan has discussed the issue of gender representation, the issue of sexism, transitivity, framing, and feminist stylistics have been studied to a lesser extent, the cognitive-semantic operation of seemingly neutral crime language has comparatively been under-explored. This article explores the linguistic strategies used in the Pakistani English newspapers to shape the interpretations of crimes against women. The data are 30 purposively selected reports from the News and Dawn newspapers from August 2022 to April 2023. The study employs a qualitative approach to content analysis, adopting a descriptive method, and is based on a cognitive-semantic perspective, in which the core theory is the Relevance Theory. Analysis is based on the compression of headlines, lexical selection, naming and categorization, attribution, evidentiality, ambiguity, and limited expression and inference. The findings reveal that most of the reports are factual, brief and neutral, but this is not cognitively neutral. Some assumptions are easier to make than others, due to lexical selection, source attribution, withheld identity and incomplete contextualization. There are 12 cases of rape, six cases of honor killing and five domestic-violence killings in the corpus. The article aims to argue that Relevance Theory provides insight into how seemingly objective journalistic language can be used to minimise processing effort and steer readers towards specific interpretations of gendered violence in the culturally specific English language crime news discourse in Pakistan.