| dc.description.abstract | Recently, Sri Lanka underwent major
political upheavals, structural and constitutional
amendments that attracted the attention of the
international community. Formulation of
dilemmatic interim government of fifty-two days,
the legal debates about alleged political
misdemeanours, presidential and general elections
were the main discourses of the Sri Lankan society
during the last couple of years. Thus, the
substantive researchers voyage on a genre analysis
in order to analytically explore the intricacies of
English journalistic writings as to how they have
been impacted by the socio-political tenacity
prevalent in the nation. These socio-political
milieus were reflected in the English Language in
myriad forums and most importantly were visible
in the mainstream media in the country,
particularly in English newspapers and led to the
creation of timely vocabulary of a brief duration. As
an instance, coinage of novel terms with a
vernacular tinge can be depicted. This new
vocabulary that was developed owing to the
political and social pressures were replete with
political implications, sarcasm and highly
pragmatic meaning. Thus, contentious political
debates and occurrences seem to have impacted on
the structural and semantic English Language used
in newspapers in the period concerned. Content
analysis method was used to interpret the textual
data and the ‘latent analysis’ method was exploited
to analyse the pragmatic meaning of the language
used. Thematic analysis was utilized to itemize the
findings in the discussion heeding semantic
denotations. It was evinced that local English
journalistic writings do amply make use of SLE and
intertwined use of vernacular language
components to relay their socio-politically driven
messages to the readership judiciously exploiting
code-switching and code-mixing strategies. Thus,
artistic journalistic writings have come into being
having been profusely fed by socio-political
transformations over the years. It has been
primarily researched how formulation of
‘localized’ English terms, affixation of English
terms with local flavour, and integration of
vernacular expressions along with English
wordings, have voiced out the intended messages
from English journalistic writings vociferously. | en_US |
