The ESCCB and the ACR: Is It the Same Fight? Reading on Others’ Ideology: A Pragmatic Analysis of the CNN and BBC Websites

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Faculty of education-.Damanhour University-Department of English

Abstract

Newspapers’ websites, at hand every moment, communicating with people, play an essential role in expressing their thoughts, feelings, and needs. The language used by editors in news reports is very influential in attaining the communicative intent of such news reports, and they are constructed and manipulated to achieve specific purposes. The speech act is a part of pragmatics by which one knows what is meant beyond what is said. Thus, the present study investigates the types and functions of speech acts employed in CNN and BBC reports about both Egyptian and American events, namely, the blockade of the Supreme Constitutional Court (ESCCB) on December 2, 2012, and the American Capitol riot (ACR) on January 6, 2021, to find out if writers represent their social ideology in the coverage of both events. The present study applies John R. Searle’s speech act theory as a framework to analyze the selected reports with a dataset of over 270,150 words on both sites about both events. Data is treated by MAXQDA software program. The results revealed that the writers of both sites are not biased against the case of the blockade and riot, but instead they are defending the stance of the law authority.

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References

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