Search

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.

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.