Lexical Choices and Conflict Narratives: A Linguistic Analysis of The New York Times' Coverage of Occupied Kashmir

Abstract

The role of the media discourse is essential in determining how people understand the prolonged conflicts, especially in the environments of the information access, flow and narrative politics, which are prone to regulation. The paper forms an analysis of the New York Times work on the Kashmir tensions, which should be regarded as a sequence of lexical choices, structural figuration, and discursive gene frames. Within a medium-level qualitative linguistic investigation based on hints of the Paz period, the study analyses a purposeful data set of distress-related Kashmir coverage during the years 2016-2024 a time frame of militarisation, agitating politics, and aggressive international civilian scrutiny. The proposed study uses the terms of critical discourse analysis, framing theory, and the preconflict period as a benchmark to evaluate the effects of word choice, metaphor, agency attribution, and evaluative intensity on the storey of conflict escalation and de-escalation. The authors devote special consideration to the usage of such terms like militants, rebels, separatists, infrentamientos, and force or security and the role of these words in thematic stress and the creation of unequal powers among participants.