A Critical Discourse Analysis of Pakistani and Indian Budget Speeches

Abstract

This study is a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Pakistani and Indian budget speeches. Two specialized corpora, Pakistani Budget Speeches (PBS) and Indian Budget Speeches (IBS), from 2009 to 2012 of both the countries were compiled. This research explored the hidden meanings through the study of Parts of Speech (POS) which were conveyed in budget speeches. These POS were limited to nouns (singular and plural), pronouns, adjectives (general), and verbs (present/past/modal). This study develops the insight that budget is declared having multiple meanings behind the statement. The study concludes that government declares the budget having some similarities and differences with other countries but hidden meanings behind the declaration is a fixed phenomenon of budget discourse.