Depiction of Kashmir in Media: A Corpus Assisted Study of Pakistani and Indian Newspapers
This work deals with the use of adjectives in the depiction of Kashmir in Pakistani and Indian Newspapers. This study investigates the differences between Pakistani and Indian media with reference to the representation of the issue of Kashmir. For this purpose, a corpus of newspaper editorial articles from both Pakistani and Indian newspapers was compiled. The data was tagged with help of AntTag and was analyzed using AntConc software to see the differences between Pakistani and Indian newspapers with reference to the representation of Kashmir. The findings suggest that there is a lot of differences between Pakistani and Indian media with reference to the use of adjectives for the depiction of Kashmir. The findings also suggest that the depiction of Kashmir in both newspapers is biased and subjective.
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Corpus Linguistics, Indian Media, Pakistani Media, Analysis of Adjectives, Kashmir Issue
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(1) Athar Rashid
Assistant professor, Department of Governance & Public Policy, National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad, Pakistan.
(2) Arshad Ali
Assistant professor, Department of English, National University of Modern Languages, Islamabad, Pakistan.
(3) Ameer Sultan
Lecturer, Department of English, International Islamic University, Islamabad, Pakistan.
Identifying Features of Pakistani Learners Writing Through MDA and Coh-Metrix
Learner language has been a source of interest for researchers of all times as it possesses common features of language in use. For investigating this, Multi-dimensional analysis (MDA) by Biber is one such approach that empirically studies practiced language and establishes grounds for those varieties too which are striving for their place in linguistic cline (Crossely, et al., 2014). The present research is an effort to explore common patterns of learner language, which are explored throughCoh-Metrix (an online data tagging tool used to assess cohesion, coherence,readability level, etc.) to study those features and their respective functions while partially using MDA methodology. Following Biber's methodology,Factor analysis was conducted, and four dimensions were identified, which provided clues for the functional association of these dimensions. The results show that Pakistani learners' argumentative writing possesses narrative features and is dominatingly overlapping at the level of vocabulary,syntactic constructions, and passage development, and even in argumentation. These findings help us to establish the fact that Pakistani English has its own identity. These results are helpful for linguists as well as teachers as the knowledge of common linguistic and syntactic structures can be assessed easily while keeping in mind the grade level of the students.
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Coh-Metrix, Factor Analysis, Multidimensional Analysis, ICLE, Corpus Linguistics
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(1) Rabia Tabassum
Government College University, Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan.
(2) Mahwish Farooq
Senior Lecturer, Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), University of Central Punjab, Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan.
(3) Muhammad Asim Mahmood
Government College University, Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan.
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.