Public Perception of Policing during Covid-19 Pandemic Lockdown: A Modality Analysis (Published)
Police as a phenomenon with public service essence state responsibility is deemed to be crucial. The purpose of this study was to investigate the public perceptions and experienced-based feelings and reactions to police during the Pandemic time. The study chose the public comments posted online as reactions to and opinions of a particular police incident that went viral in the netizens’ world. Using Halliday’s systemic functional grammatical tool i.e., modality, the study analyzed the data. The findings and some recommendations are discussed.
Keywords: : Modality, COVID-19, Facebook comments, India, Police
Ideology in News Reports: Al-Jazeera Reporters As Representative: A Critical Discourse Analysis (Published)
This paper adopts a critical discourse analysis approach to investigate the way reporters of Al-Jazeera English Satellite Channel use to covey events and actions during the Syrian crisis. The study aims to find out whether reporters are neutral in their coverage or they carry an ideology which accords with one of the warring parties of conflict. It also aims at finding out the ideological implications that reporters have in the news texts toward the parties of conflict in Syria. The study hypothesizes that news reporters of Al-Jazeera are not neutral, but rather they have a prejudiced and a one-sided ideology towards the conflicted parties. For the analysis of the data, the study follows Van Dijk’s (1998) model of ‘ideological square’. The analysis is limited to investigate some discourse features, among many others, for their importance and their abundance in the data under scrutiny. Finally, the study has come with some conclusions that validate the hypotheses.
Keywords: : Modality, CDA, Contrasts, Crisis, Ideology, Media, Topics, Transparency
MODALITY IN STATEMENT OF OBJECTIVES IN ARTS-BASED RESEARCH ARTICLE ABSTRACTS (Published)
This article explores the discourse functions of modality in statement of objectives in arts-based research article abstracts. For data, objective statements segments of three hundred abstracts of research articles obtained from the internet and purposively selected were analysed using insights from the linguistic tool of modality. Four categories of modal auxiliaries namely; possibility, necessity, prediction and permission modals characterised the data. Possibility modals are used in stating analytical scope and research goal in the abstracts; necessity modals are employed in stating analytical scope, presenting argument, seeking permission and/or making polite request; and prediction models are used in stating the researchers’ research missions in predictive form. Apart from complimenting the existing works in research discourse in general and research article abstracts in particular, our analysis has no doubt provided useful insights into the roles of modal auxiliary verbs in Statement of Objectives (SO) segment of the arts-based research article abstracts.
Keywords: : Modality, Discourse Function, Research Article Abstracts, Statement of Objectives