Linguistics Analysis of Pakistani English Newspaper Editorials: A Multidimensional Approach

Abstract

The importance of linguistic variation has been discussed in a variety of theoretical, methodological and practical studies (e.g. Biber, 1988, 1994, 2002, 2009, and 2013). These studies have contributed to the description of any language variety defined by its situational characteristics. Pakistani English (PE) is an emerging independent, non-native variety of English. However, currently there is a lack of a comprehensive description of its characteristics in the literature. The present research addresses this problem by investigating the linguistic variation of Pakistani English newspaper editorials (PNE.). It aims to identify if the language used in PNE is a distinguished linguistic sub-register of Pakistani Newspaper English. In order to address this question, the technique of multidimensional (MD) analysis is utilized, which provides detailed grammatical information about the corpus and helps in interpreting and comparing the corpus to the text genres and typologies that have already been studied, labeled and commonly acknowledged in the English language. A diverse dataset, consisting of 1500 editorials from five leading newspapers, with three subcategories (personal editorials, organizational editorials and letters to the editor) has been compiled which provides a variety and range of topics covered by different authors of the Pakistani community. The resulting corpus is tagged for 147 linguistic features and factor analysis has been conducted, to identify major linguistic patterns of co-occurrence. Total nine textual dimensions are utilized to define some of the linguistic and functional characteristics of PNE corpus. The dimensions collectively provide information content, narrative features, situation-oriented references, extent of argumentative language, abstract style, evidencebased discourse, specialized information and interactive discourse. The results of the old (previously identified dimensions; 88 MD analyses) and new MD (Full MD analysis to determine new dimensions) shows marked linguistic variation among different categories of the PNE corpus. Based on these results, it is proposed that linguistic variation occurs in the editorial writing of Pakistani English on both national and international levels.