A Corpus-Based Comparative Study of Derivational Morphemes Across ENL, ESL, EFL Learners Through ICNALE

This corpus-based comparative study was about morphemic derivational patterns in grammatical categories: adjective, noun and verbs in different varieties: English as native language (ENL), English as second language (ESL), and English as foreign language (EFL). This study was done on data collected from ICNALE in which learners’ data from three different varieties of English was compared. The data was tagged through CLAWS tagger and analyzed through AntConc software. In result of analysis, the frequency-based differences in the morphemic derivational patterns were observed after normalizing the data. Such differences across varieties in morphemic patterns were realized through the existence and absence of derivational morphemes. The results showed that the native speakers have higher ability of using a greater number of morphemic patterns than second and foreign language speakers of English. Due to their native like competence, they are more competent is the usage of morphemic derivational patterns. Those distinctive patterns should also be taken as pedagogical implication for second and foreign language learners of English. It can also be helpful for second and foreign language learners in achieving native like ability to use English language

Highlighting the Sound Shift in Punjabi Language: A Corpus-Based Descriptive Study

Punjabi language is most widely spoken language of Pakistan (Abbas, Chohan, Ahmed, & Kaleem, 2016). Punjabi is under developed language because of which, upcoming generations are shifting to other technically and digitally developed languages such as Urdu and English. In result of which, the sound shift is being observed in Punjabi language. Sounds which used to be present in the past in Punjabi language are found missing now. This leads to a problematic situation that this sound shift may result in language extinction and sound loss. This study is about the sound change and it has been studied in Punjabi language. On the basis of observation of speech in surrounding, researcher made a hypothesis that those speakers of Punjabi language who acquired Punjabi as L1 are able to produce few distinctive sounds that are not produced by the speakers who acquired Urdu as a mother tongue. For this purpose, a corpus of 2 million words was collected and the words including the sounds |n|ن  and |l| ل were particularly shortlisted from the corpus. The speakers from both origins were asked to pronounce these words, the hypothesis was proved and, in result, variations in the pronunciation of sounds were observed. Sociolinguists and Phonologists need to heed on this issue to save Punjabi language from extinction

Highlighting the Sound Shift in Punjabi Language: A Corpus-Based Descriptive Study

Punjabi language is most widely spoken language of Pakistan (Abbas, Chohan, Ahmed, & Kaleem, 2016). Punjabi is under developed language because of which, upcoming generations are shifting to other technically and digitally developed languages such as Urdu and English. In result of which, the sound shift is being observed in Punjabi language. Sounds which used to be present in the past in Punjabi language are found missing now. This leads to a problematic situation that this sound shift may result in language extinction and sound loss. This study is about the sound change and it has been studied in Punjabi language. On the basis of observation of speech in surrounding, researcher made a hypothesis that those speakers of Punjabi language who acquired Punjabi as L1 are able to produce few distinctive sounds that are not produced by the speakers who acquired Urdu as a mother tongue. For this purpose, a corpus of 2 million words was collected and the words including the sounds |n|ن and |l| ل were particularly shortlisted from the corpus. The speakers from both origins were asked to pronounce these words, the hypothesis was proved and, in result, variations in the pronunciation of sounds were observed. Sociolinguists and Phonologists need to heed on this issue to save Punjabi language from extinction

A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF COHERENT WRITING SKILLS OF PAKISTANI ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS

Coherent writing skills are essentialprerequisites for the construction of the academic discourse, specifically at the undergraduate level.Coherence in writing can be attainedvia the utilization of textual metafunction. The textual metafunctionrealized by the Theme-Rheme system organizes ideational and interpersonal meanings in discourse to generate coherence at the local and global levels. The mixed-method research aims to investigate the coherent writing skills of undergraduate Pakistani learners. The Theme and Thematic progression patterns (T/TP)based on the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) were applied to twenty-five argumentative essays of Pakistani learners retrieved from the International Corpus of Learners English (ICLE).The findings demonstrate that most undergraduate Pakistani English Learners overused prenominals at the onset of clausesand constant thematic progressionchoicesto link the clauses. These two factors formedPakistani learners’ argumentative writing into descriptive writing, and the underutilization of interpersonal and textual thematic choices further indicated Pakistani learners’ unawareness about the social norms of persuasive writing. The pedagogical implications of this study provide English Language Teachers (ELTs) and English Language Learners (ELLs) with a wide range of explicit lexico-grammatical resources to maintain the coherenceat the text leve

Epenthesis in Urdu

The motivation of this research is epenthesis, an important Urdu phonological phenomenon. Presently, this work deals with the phonological rules for understanding the role of epenthesis and re-syllabification in Urdu content words, at larger scale, in speech of Pakistani Urdu speakers. The 10 hours audio-corpus has become the source of motivation for the current study due to its multiple pronunciations (Farooq & Mumtaz, 2016), (Farooq & Mahmood, 2020). That annotated speech data has multiple information i.e., same parts-of speech (POS), spellings and meanings but different pronunciations which ultimately becomes the cause of re-syllabification at different places and contexts. Therefore, that annotated speech corpus is used as baseline of this research (Mumtaz, et al., 2014), (Habib, Hijab, Hussain, & Adeeba, 2014) but the selected words’ list includes only those words which have different pronunciations occurred due to the epenthesis. Later this list has been shared and asked to record by 29 native Urdu speakers in Pakistan. Thus, data analysis has confirmed different reasons for causing epenthesis in Urdu; (i) contextual variations, (ii) inter-speaker variations, (iii) stress variations, (iv) multilingual effect, etc. All these variations become the reasons for alternative pronunciations. It is also confirmed that alternative pronunciations are present in the speech data of all speakers but a speaker can use a single pronunciation at a time. Therefore, all different pronunciations have attained the status of alternative pronunciations (Farooq & Mumtaz, 2016) in Pakistani Urdu

Implicitation in Pakistani Novel, An Analysis of English Target Text Hollow Pursuits and Urdu Source Text La Hasil [Retracted]

[The research paper is retracted at the author's request]The purpose of this research is to investigate the implicitation shifts in English translated novel “Hollow pursuits” as compared to the originally written Urdu novel “La Hasil”. The research aims to focus on the implicitation occurrences in the translated text and their impact on the translation meaning and context. The other purpose of this research is to examine how implicitation impacts the overall quality of the English source Text (ST) as compared to the Urdu target text (TT). To analyze implicitation in the English TT a framework of categorization given by Klaudy (2009) is undertaken. Corpus-based and manual reading of data is used as a methodology to conduct the analysis. The findings of the research described that in Urdu-English translation direction the levels of implicitation could not be followed properly which could make the TT balanced. The translator intended to optionally shift the language more in translated text as compared to the ST

TEXTUAL IMPACT OF THE ORGANIZATIONAL PATTERNS ON PAKISTANI ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAYS

Coherence is an essential attribute of a successful piece of academic writing. When a learner produces an essay that is inconvenient for a reader to follow, the comprehensibility of the text is compromised despite the merit of its ideas. According to Eggins (2004, p.54), coherence can be achieved through scaffolding the generic phases of the text according to its cultural purpose. This research aimed to investigate the organizational patterns of argumentative essays and the organizational challenges faced by undergraduate Pakistani English Language Learners. For accomplishing the research purposes, Hyland’s model of the argumentative genre (1990) was deployed to identify the organizational patterns of the Pakistani learners’ essays, and the genre theory proposed by Martin and Rose (2007) was selected to categorize the organizational challenges confronted by Pakistani learners in attempting to write the argumentative essays. For the analysis, 50 argumentative essays were retrieved from the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE). The findings reveal that Pakistani learners possessed a limited understanding of argumentative essay writing on account of skipping the obligatory phases of the argumentative essays and facing the challenges of fronting, inconsistency, and generality in the phases of the thesis, argument, and conclusion stages. It is reasonable to assume that Pakistani learners need explicit instructions and practice to improve the organizational structure of the argumentative essay. &nbsp

A Comparative Perspective on Legal Register in Pakistani English

The present study investigates linguistic variation of legal register in relation to other special and non-special registers in Pakistani English by applying multidimensional analysis approach introduced by Biber (1988) in his work “Variation across Speech and Writing”. In order to describe a register, a comparative register perspective yields baseline data to comprehend the linguistic properties of an individual register. Comparative studies show that there are significant linguistic differences among registers, known as the patterns of register variation. Thus the current study aims to reveal differences and similarities among legal register and other registers in Pakistani context. The corpus of the study includes legal register with eight legal genres and about two million words whereas mean dimension scores of other registers have been taken from Ahmad and Mahmood, 2015; Hussain, Mahmood and Azher, 2016; Alvi, Mehmood and Rasool, 2016.  The results show that legal register and editorials are significantly different from each other along dimension 1,3,4,5 whereas legal register and press reportage are found statistically significantly different along all five dimensions. As regards comparison of legal register and non-special registers, the results reveal highly significant difference between them. It indicates that legal register has specific lexico-grammatical features which distinguish it from other registers. Difference among registers might be due to their different goals, norms and audience. It reveals that functional interpretations on the basis of texts regardless of register variation are inadequate

ACOUSTIC BEHAVIOR OF ENGLISH TRIPHTHONGS IN PAKISTANI ENGLISH VARIETY

In this research, the acoustic behavior of English triphthongs has been analyzed in Pakistani English (PakE) variety. A triphthong is a gliding movement of three consecutive vowels. According to Roach (2009), majority of English speakers (with BBC pronunciation) perceived few words as monosyllabic vocabulary by identifying triphthongs. English has five triphthongs which are comprised with the combination of closing diphthongs followed by a short vowel schwa (ə). Contrarily, this condition may not compulsory for PakE due to the language variation phenomenon as we know that two diverse languages have different approaches. If there are some similarities in them than consider them just coincidence nothing else. Presently, it has been proposed that the native language, Urdu affects the acoustic behavior of English triphthongs therefore, two different experimental approaches are adopted. In the first step, the auditory approach has used syllable count technique. While in the second step, the identified segments have been acoustically analyzed in PRAAT. After data analysis, the results have reported that Urdu has influenced and transformed the acoustic features of PakE. Therefore, there is no trace of English triphthongs in PakE variety and they are replaced with a monophthong, diphthong or syllabic division