A CORPUS-ASSISTED COMPARATIVE STUDY OF CYBERCRIME REPRESENTATION IN DAWN AND THE GUARDIAN

Cybercrime has become one of the fastest-growing issues in the contemporary digital world. This study examines the representation of “cybercrime” in Pakistani newspaper Dawn and British newspaper The Guardian through a corpus-assisted comparative analysis. The research aims to explore how cybercrime is linguistically constructed in both newspapers by identifying the frequency of key lexical items, their collocational patterns, and their contextual usage through concordance analysis. The study is grounded in corpus linguistics. It employs a mixed-methods approach as it combines quantitative and qualitative analysis to provide a deeper understanding of “cybercrime” representation in selected newspapers. The data for this study consists of 200 articles from the online archives of both newspapers. They have been specifically searched by using the keyword “cybercrime”. Furthermore, the analysis was conducted in three steps using Sketch Engine. The frequency analysis reveals that Dawn is stronger in crime framing, whereas The Guardian focuses more on security concerns. Then, collocation analysis examines the words commonly associated with the keyword “cybercrime”. It reveals the dominant themes and concerns highlighted by each newspaper. The concordance (KWIC) analysis provides contextual insights into how cybercrime was framed and discussed. The findings reveal noticeable differences in the representation of “cybercrime” between the newspapers. Dawn mainly constructs cybercrime as a legal, institutional, and governance issue. However, The Guardian presents cybercrime as a global technological problem. Moreover, the research contributes to the field of corpus linguistics by providing a comparative analysis of cybercrime representation in national and international newspapers.