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This article explores ideographs in the inaugural speeches of Heads of State/Government of Pakistan from the country’s founding in 1947 to 2018 – the time of the latest inaugural speeches in Pakistan’s political history. The data was collected from multiple sources, mostly official. A total of fifty-eight speeches were analyzed, which contained 124,363 words—averaging 2,144 words apiece. The study was qualitative in nature and employed McGee’s framework of Ideographic Criticism for data analysis. Setting ‘ideograph’ as a unit of analysis, the study carried out repeated close readings of the speeches. The analysis involved five steps: identification, translation (in case of Urdu speeches), categorization, contextualization and interpretation. Thus, in all 493 ideographs (both positive and negative) were identified in the speeches. While analysis of such a large number of ideographs was practically impossible, only 58 ideographs (47 positive and 11 negative), which had a frequency of 10 or above in both English and Urdu speeches taken together or in either of the languages, were analyzed diachronically. This study is the first attempt of its kind in the context of Pakistan and contributes at four levels: Theory, Method, Genre and Context.

Verb-Control citations signify purposeful communication between the theses writers and readers. The earlier researches on references or citations used in theses and research articles focused on showing differences in general, lesser data, and partial analysis (Jalilifar, 2012). Furthermore, the research on Verb-Control citations/reporting verbs (Factives, Non-Factives, Counter-Factives) needs to be explored in Pakistan's academic context. This research explores the Ph.D. theses, deliberating over the choice of reporting verbs employed as Verb-Control citations. The study was conducted across Ph.D. dissertations namely, English (Linguistics, Literature), English Language Teaching (ELT), Biological Studies (Bio-Technology, Botany, Zoology), and Social Sciences (Education, Psychology, Political Science) in a non-English academic environment. AntConc was employed to analyze the data. Thompson &Ye's (1991) study, “Evaluation in the reporting verbs used in academic papers”, was used as a theoretical model. Hence, the writers of the Ph.D. theses were found more inclined to use Non-Factives as against other forms of reporting verbs. Besides others, the basic reason behind these variations is the predominance of the verbs related to tests, experimentations along with the words referring to scientific procedures in Biological Sciences.

This study unveils some strategies deployed by James Joyce to manipulate the reader when they experience textual patterns to decipher meaning from the text. Investigating Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this study delves into how the reader is pragmatically positioned and cognitively (mis)directed as Joyce guides their attention and influences their judgment. Thus, the text is a tool in the hand of the reader which evokes certain responses in readers and makes them invest time and struggle in understanding the text. Joyces use of speech categories and their speech acts or their summaries are crucial determining factors for the scales and corresponding modes of discourse presentation (Semino and Short 2004,p.19). The study concludes by providing the significant and functional role of the interplay between two highly complex discourse phenomena: speech acts and discourse presentation.

This article utilizes the theory of narrative style which is interesting from both the standpoint of literary stylistics as well as from that of the theory of communication. In this framework, the relation of a narrator to a reader is the basic relationship underlying all narrative structures. According to this basic relationship a number of ways of narration are differentiated or, as Mc Hale (1978) calls them represented/reported discourse. This article endeavours a systematic analysis of the stylistic devices used in fictional writing for the representation of a character’s speech and thought. So, the present study attempts to analyze the interaction between categories of speech and thought presentation in James Joyce’s Dubliners by applying Leech and Short Model (2007). Excerpts of 2000-word length have been selected and manually tagged to have the accurate annotation keeping in mind the contextual potential to recognize discourse categories in Joyce fiction and then corpus software AntConc (Laurence Anthony, 2018) was used to get quantitative results. Since fictional texts display the tendency to move between categories of speech and thought presentation as well as between the modes within one category and its demarcation is a real challenge to the researchers. The practical part of research was done on the basis of short stories from James Joyce’s Dubliners. Special emphasis is given to variations between the two modes as well as to the instances of ambiguity created by their interplay.