Graduation markers in sports news: a comparative study of evaluative language in British and Pakistani English

The bias in sports news reporting is usually influenced by the language and culture of journalists, who have a tendency to be subjective and ideological. This study examines the role of graduation markers (linguistic resources utilized to escalate or reduce attitudes and judgments) in sports news reporting in two institutionalized forms of English: The British (inner circle) and the Pakistani (outer circle) English. To support the conceptual and theoretical framework with the help of the Martin and White appraisal theory, this study determines and describes the difference in the frequency of use of graduation markers within the two corpora. The datasets, which had one million words each, were collected using online English newspapers published in the period between January and March 2019. In this study, mixed-method sequential explanatory design has been adopted for qualitative interpretation and quantitative frequency analysis. Results indicate that there are significant variations in the use of graduation markers, which suggests different trends that either accentuate or mitigate attitudes in British and Pakistani sports coverage. The British sports journalists used more graduation-force markers (intensity: 28.68%, quantity: 48.43%, enhancement: 17.49%) as compared to Pakistani news writers (24.74%, 24.12%, 12.34%) Whereas Pakistani news writers have used higher degree of graduation-focus markers (sharpening: 20.61%, softening: 18.17%) as compared to British news writers (3.41%, 2.03%) suggesting a varying degree of use of graduation markers. This study advances cross-cultural discourse analysis by demonstrating how linguistic choices shape journalistic stance and audience engagement across English varieties.