Transitivity in Pakistani English: A Corpus-based Approach towards Mapping Frequency Profiles
This paper aims at building frequency profiles based on transitivity patterns of a small number of text corpora belonging to Pakistani English newspaper editorials. The profiles have been built by using UAM Corpus Tool (O’ Donnell, 2008) to explore transitivity features. The empirical analysis then has been compared with the frequency profiles of English language (Matthiessen, 2006 and Stubbs, 1996) to establish common features. The present work draws inspiration by Michael Halliday who is known as one of the pioneer corpus linguists since his early work on the Chinese language (Halliday 1956, cited in Halliday 1993). Mapping his (ibid) study on the BNC model he concluded that the relative frequencies of past and non-past are about 50-50 and the relative frequencies of positive and negative are about 9-1 (reported in Halliday 1993). Similarly, the present study looks closer to Standard English, and this is partially because the editorials are written by professional writers, and are well edited before printing.
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Systemic Functional Grammar, Transitivity, Corpus Linguistics, Frequency Profiles, Pakistani English
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(1) Tazanfal Tehseem
Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Sargodha, Sargodha, Punjab, Pakistan.
(2) Mubina Talaat
Professor, Department of English, Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, Punjab, Pakistan.
Treatment Of Environmental Issues In Leading Pakistani Dailies
Environmental issues are contemplated as the most frightening and challenging issues that occurred due to climate change. These environmental issues are disturbing the whole world including living species. Pakistan is also facing issues regarding environmental changes. Pakistan is considered the 7th most susceptible country in terms of environmental disasters. The current research is conducted to study and analyze the treatment of Pakistani English papers in the coverage of ecological issues and the basic drive of this research is to evaluate the “media representation of environmental issues” as discussed in leading Pakistani dailies (Dawn and The News). The content analysis is used to know the frequency and direction of environmental issues. The universe of the study contains textual content of print media including news stories and editorials. It is concluded that The News, gives more coverage to environmental issues as compared to Dawn newspaper in terms of news stories and editorials.
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Environmental Issues, Media Representation, Pakistani English Dailies, Content Analysis
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(1) Nasim Ishaq
School of Communication Studies, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan.
(2) Ghazala Kanwal Ejaz
Govt. Fatima Jinnah College (W), Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan.
(3) Noor
Govt. Fatima Jinnah College (W), Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan.
A Tale of Two Languages in Blogging: Code-Switching Analysis in Pakistani Blogosphere
Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) have brought about a new medium for information sharing and communication and weblogs are becoming more and more popular in the virtual sphere. The process of code- switching can be traced in this fast evolving medium of communication. This paper aims at investigating the existence of code-switching patterns by examining the categories and frequency of Urdu code-switches in Pakistani English weblogs authored by Pakistani bloggers. The quantitative and qualitative approaches were used in this study. The blog entries of 10 Pakistani bloggers were analyzed by using the descriptive research paradigm. The findings illustrated that the linguistic choices of Pakistani bloggers as bilingual internet users are living in between two worlds, two cultures, and two languages which they employ in this mode of communication to fully express themselves. The findings showed the linguistic features that are particular to the context of CMC. The study concluded that the presence of code-switching in CMC have to be considered and treated as a unique and different entity from spoken form or written form of code-switching to capture its fundamental attributes.
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Bilinguals, Code-Switching, Computer-Mediated Communication, Pakistani English Weblogs, Pakistani Bloggers, Weblog
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(1) Kanwal Fatima
PhD Scholar, Department of English, Fatima Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi, Punjab, Pakistan. Assistant Editor (English), ORIC, Allama Iqbal Open University, Islamabad, Pakistan.
(2) Samina Amin Qadir
Professor Emeritus, Department of English, Fatima Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi, Punjab, Pakistan.