A Corpus-Based Multidimensional Analysis of Linguistic Variation in Pakistani English Novels: A Genre-Functional Approach to ELT

Abstract

Corpora has revolutionized language study and transformed the methods used by linguists and academics in English language teaching. This study explores linguistic variation through patterns of co-occurring linguistic features at lexical and grammatical levels in Pakistani English novels. This is a corpus-based study that seeks insight from Biber’s model of five-Dimensional Analysis. A dataset of six Pakistani English novels (e.g., Bina Shah’s A Season of Martyr, Soniah Kamal’s An Isolated Incident, Kamila Shamsie’s God in Every Stone, Saba Imtiaz’s Karachi You’re Killing Me, Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mango, and Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire) has been developed carefully. The dataset has been tagged and analyzed via MAT tagger which replicates Biber’s (1988) multi-dimensional analysis framework. This study simultaneously follows the parameters of exploratory quantitative research, focusing on achieving objectivity with the statistical data collected through corpus analysis and by incorporating the researcher’s assertions by discussing and interpreting the results. The results indicated that Pakistani English Novels are written in the form of narrative discourse. The language of Pakistani English novels is informational in dimension 1, descriptive in dimension 2, non-argumentative in dimension 3, elaborated in dimension 4, and informal and non-abstract in dimension 5. Therefore, it is closest to the general narrative genre. In the current study, an effort is being made to assist English language teachers and students in Pakistan in comprehending and using corpus-based language teaching pedagogy in classroom settings. This approach can be advantageous for individuals learning the English language and for academic communities seeking to comprehend the diverse applications of vocabulary and their contextual significance.