Stress Patterns in Pakistani Standard English

Abstract

English, as a non native variety, in Pakistan has acquired its own form most pronounced on the phonological level. The few attempts to study its structures treated phonology as marginalized part of lexical or syntactic descriptions. And even when phonological descriptions are carried out, the focus was segmental features only. Consequently, the present study aims to explore supra-segmental features exclusively which make significant differences in pronunciation and cause problem of unintelligibility. Among many sub-varieties of Pakistani English (PE), the variety of English news media which is considered to be Pakistani Standard English (PSE) is investigated through auditory and acoustic phonetics. For acoustic analysis, Praat software is used to get the waveform and spectrographs of word structures. Later, these prosodic structures are discussed in detail. Moreover, syllable structures and prosody of PSE are analysed in the optimality theory framework. First, the constraints on the syllable and word stress patterns were ranked to form a grammar of these phonological features by forming violation Tableaus to understand interaction of these constraints. Further more, a new way of doing OT is introduced in this thesis, that is violation computing method (VCM). This method addresses the most complicated issue of OT analysis- ranking of constraints. The VCM is applied by ranking constraints of two phonological processes in PSE- syllable structure and word stress patterns. It is further tested and verified by re-analysing constraints interaction with the method suggested by Prince & Smolensky (1993/2004). It is concluded that among many other differences, PSE forms ‘iambic’ foot pattern; unlike native varieties of English which make ‘trochaic’ foot pattern.