A Critical Discourse Analysis of Election Manifestos of Pakistani Political Parties

Present research aims at conducting Critical Discourse Analysis of election manifestoes of the major political parties of Pakistan by using corpus-driven methodology.Corpora have been compiled from the manifestos of three major political parties: PPP, PTI and PML-N from elections 2008 and 2013. The major purpose of the study is to explore the agendas of political parties hidden in the manifestos through grammatical and lexical features. Lexical fields, passive voice, nouns, verbs, pronouns have been studied in detail in order to generate multiple meanings. Comparative study of manifestos reflects that political parties have dual contexts behind simple statements.The research is expected to be significant in the sense that it may provide the covert information to laymen and might make them more aware of the alternative choice available to them in the form of the political parties. Keywords: CDA, Corpus-driven, Manifestos, Political discourse, POS