A Diachronic Analysis of the 2015 Presidential Election News in Sri Lankan English Newspapers

Abstract

“Diachronic Analysis of the 2015 Presidential Election News in Sri Lankan English Newspapers” is a study which was done in order to recognize the elements of stance in the news articles published in Sri Lankan English newspapers before and after the 2015 presidential election in Sri Lanka. This study was done by using data which were downloaded from the online publications of two Sri Lankan English newspapers; ‘The Sunday Times’ and ‘The Sunday Observer’ and the analysis was done by using the corpus-based linguistics tools. The keywords lists and concordance lines of keywords from the data downloaded from newspapers were created by using the WordSmith 5 corpus linguistics tools. A keywords analysis and a concordance lines analysis of a number of selected keywords of the two newspapers were done with the intention of seeking out evidence of stance before and after the election. It was found that the newspapers bear different attitudes about the selected keywords for the analysis and most of the stances they had before the election about the selected keywords, had changed after the election. Newspapers are considered as an important medium in reporting the elections in Sri Lanka. The newspaper industry in Sri Lanka is a very lively one with a wider accessibility, since most of the newspapers have online editions too. Therefore, this study is very significant, because this was the first time that a corpus linguistic methodology was used to carry out an empirical study about how the 2015 presidential election was reported by the Sri Lankan English newspapers press.