Examining the Discursive Construction of Power, Fear, and Ideological Positioning in Pakistan–India War (2025) News Headlines through an AntConc-Based Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analytical Approach

Abstract

The paper analyses the discursive construction of power/fear/ideological stance in the news headlines of Pakistan- India War (2025) using an AntConc based corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis. The contextual background of the study rests in the fact that media language especially headline is very important in forming the perception of the people, national identities and political ideologies in the event of a war. The main aim of the study is to evaluate the prevailing patterns of lexical language and discursivity styles that portray ideological framing in Pakistani and Indian media discourse. In methodology, the study is based on a qualitative-dominant mixed-methodology involving corpus linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. AntConc is used to create word frequencies, collocations and lines of concordance, which give empirical evidence to critical interpretation. The Discourse-Historical Approach as developed by Ruth Wodak informs the theoretical framework and the postcolonial theory is added to put discourse in the context of historical memory and colonial legacies. The data include a purposely selected collection of 100 news headlines in English language, half of them in Pakistani newspapers and half in Indian newspapers, taken online editions in the conflict 2025. The results indicate that militarized and fear-oriented language is predominant, systematic binary oppositions are used between the national actors, and the intensification strategies are frequently employed to justify the power and authority, whereas the diplomatic and peace-oriented language is relatively marginalized.