A Pragma-Semantic Analysis of Ideological Representation in News Headlines of DAWN and The Nation: A Comparative Study

The news headlines are integral part of our daily life. Most of the News Editors employ vagueness or ambiguities in their headlines. They intentionally or unintentionally make the headlines ambiguous. It led to unintended frustration and violence. Pragmatic is the study of context and situation with respect to meanings. The goal of the current study is to pinpoint the specific sorts of pragmatic-semantic elements that use to shape ideological representation through news headlines of DAWN and The Nation. This comparative study provides deep insights into Searle’s Speech Act Theory and Van Dijk’s CDA approach. For the study, almost 10 sets of statements have been selected and put under into the qualitative descriptive research. The statements were taken from two prominent news sources, The Nations’, and ‘DAWN’. Lexical variation has also been studied and major themes found out through Nvivo 12 software.