Modality in Editorials of Pakistani English Newspapers: A Corpus Based Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Modality is an important grammatical expression which finds its expression in the editorial section of newspapers in Pakistan. Firstly, this paper deals with the analysis of “Modals” in English and highlights their nature and function. Secondly, it reports on which modal verbs are commonly used by the editors. Thirdly, it is focused on how the modal verbs in Pakistani English newspapers are used to manipulate readers’ opinion towards specific issues. For this purpose, a corpus of two Pakistani English newspapers: The Dawn and The News, equally divided by editors, was analyzed wielding concordance tool. The comparative analysis of these newspapers revealed that both the editors chose mainly predictive auxiliary modals such as will and would to the other types of modal. The predictive modal for The News suggested that prediction about the future “what will/would happen” was the major apprehension of the editorial writers. On the other hand, comparing the modals of obligation in the two newspapers, The Daily Dawn was more focused on solution—what should be done.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".