Reconstruction of Political Dogmas: A Critical Discourse Study of Political Pages on Facebook

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Muhammad Nasir
Fehmina Nazar
Mahvish Jamil
Javed Ahmad
Zeenat Ameer

Abstract

Propagation of ideology through political discourse has been employed by the statesmen since a long time. The emergence of the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has made exposition of hidden ideologies in the political discourse. This theory supports to explain the discourse from micro to macro level with the linguistics and semiotic features. The present study is also taken in regard to analyze the political postings on social media to expose the political discourse hidden in text and semiotics especially after the emergence of elections 2018 and its social influence in political ideology construction. The political discourse analysis (PDA) has wide range of explaining the hidden messages, ideology construction and deconstruction. The researcher selected ten posts from political pages of ruling party PTI (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf) and PML-N (Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz) with opposite ideologies and 05 posts from public figure page Baba Koda. The adopted models of CDA are of Fairclough (2009) and Van Dijik (2010) for the analysis of the posts. The results describe that the discourse used on Facebook is highly pragmatic in which political ideologies are deconstructing by using different terms according to situation as price increasing, corruption, illegal use of power, poor administration and foreign relations etc. This type of discourse attempts to catch the people’s attention towards certain types of thoughts in the legitimated way as the speakers are well-wishers of the public while the resistance is being shown by the public figure page in the language of common man but full of similes and exemplifications.

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Muhammad Nasir, Fehmina Nazar, Mahvish Jamil, Javed Ahmad, & Zeenat Ameer. (2023). Reconstruction of Political Dogmas: A Critical Discourse Study of Political Pages on Facebook. Al-Qanṭara, 9(4), 11–41. Retrieved from https://alqantarajournal.com/index.php/Journal/article/view/327
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