Generic Structure of the blurbs in Pakistani E-Socio-Romantic Novels

This paper studies the generic move structure of the blurbs of Electronic Socio-romantic novels published in Pakistan. It explores the move schema, the number of moves and their order in different blurbs. It also observes the most focused and the most neglected move in these blurbs. 20 book blurbs have been collected from online source and the model presented by Valor (2005) has been adapted for their analysis. The results reveal that there have been total 6 moves and 12 steps in the blurbs of Pakistani socio-romantic novels. Most of the moves have no fix order. The “Description” move has been followed by all the blurbs where as “publisher’s info” has been least attended by them. This suggests that this genre does not rely much on Publisher’s name for their promotion; rather the description of the story has been used as a tool to attract the potential readers. Key words: book blurbs, socio-romantic novels, genre analysi

A Corpus Based Study of Distribution of Preposition in Pakistani and British Englishes

The present study, in the context of World Englishes, explores the distribution of preposition across two varieties of English i.e. Pakistani and British Englishes. It is a corpus based research and studies the frequency of preposition along with its types and (un)shared prepositions in the said varieties. These varieties of English have been studied using Lancaster- Oslo-Bergen (LOB), Freiburg LOB (FLOB) and Pakistani Written English corpus (PWE) respectively. CLAWS Tagger 7 and Antconc.3.3.5 have been used as research tools. The corpus methodology has contributed significantly to gain objective and quantitative findings. In Pakistani English the preposition has been found to be used more frequently than in the British variety. There have been found no significant differences between the numbers of the types of preposition. The findings of the study correspond closely to that of Mindt and Weber’s study (1989) conducted on the prepositional distribution in American and British Englishes. Keywords: Pakistani English; World Englishes; Preposition; Corpus based study

Cultural Representation in ESL Textbooks in Pakistan?A Case Study of “Step Ahead 1”

The issue of culture inculcation in EFL/ESL learning and teaching has gained attention in ‘World Englishes’ scenario along with the voices of ‘Glocalization’ (Tiplady, 2003), acculturation and international culture, advocating the concepts of the amalgamation of global and local aspects of a phenomena, the mixing up of learner’s native and target culture and overall world culture as a whole respectively. There are two views regarding the cultural representation in ESL/EFL learning and teaching; the source culture i.e. learners’ native culture should be presented or only the exposure to target culture i.e. the culture of the countries where English is spoken as first language should be given. The present study is an attempt to highlight the cultural representation in ESL textbook using the model presented by Byram et al. (1994). The results reveal that the major focus of the textbook Step Ahead 1 is non-native culture, inadequate insufficient inter-cultural harmony is found in it and the least consideration has been given to the source culture, which is likely to alienate the learners from their own culture. The researchers argue that there should be ‘glocalized’ approach in such a sensitive issue and conclude with some suggestions that the books used as ESL textbooks should contain some aspects of both the target and source culture and there should be the intercultural harmony as well. Keywords: culture, source culture, target culture, ESL textbook

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