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The advent of corpora has opened new vistas for language study and restructured linguists' and academicians' approaches to lexicography and English language teaching (ELT). After 1980s, the use of online language corpora and computer tools garnered tremendous attention of English language teachers and academicians. Keeping in view the modern trends and needs of learners, this research focused on the practical implications of online corpora for ELT and its utility in the Pakistani context. Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) is used as a reference corpus for this research. MICASE is a collection of nearly 1.8 million words of transcribed speech (almost two hundred hours of recording). The transcribed data of MICASE includes wide range of speech events like seminars, lectures, advisory meetings and lab sessions. The study identified the utility of lexical items at syntactic level and its usage in various contexts. Furthermore, the layers of meanings and uses of lexicons through in-depth study of right and left collocates were explored in the reference corpus. The results showed that lexicons can be used as noun, verb and adjective depending upon the context of the study and right and left collocates play a significant role in understanding the meanings of lexical items in various contexts. Thus, this strategy can be fruitful for English language learners and academic discourse community who are interested in understanding the versatile uses of lexical items and their contextual meaning.

Media (mis)representation of transgender people has become crucial in shaping the perception, attitude and behaviours of the masses towards them all over the world. Pakistani media is not an exception regarding the portrayal of transgender individuals living in Pakistan. The current study focuses on revealing media representation of Pakistani trans people through blogs published in the country. The current study employs corpus approaches to explore this representation of transgender identity by analysing newspapers' blogs published on the subject (i.e. on transgender people) in Pakistan. The concordance lines of the first ten recurrent content words including transgender, community, people, rights, Pakistan, gender, society, persons, government, and identity from the word list were analysed to explore the themes related to the identity of transgender people in the country. The study found linguistic expressions of transgender apartheid in Pakistan at all levels of the social fabric of the country. However, at the same time discourse of solidarity towards transgender identity was also noticed in the data of the current study. The study proffers an insight to the linguists in general and corpus linguists, in particular, to extend theoretical conceptualization, application of linguistic methods and corpus linguistic techniques to highlight the issues/problems faced by transgender people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigated the various ways and structures by which legislators and politicians (during political discussions) disregard the Cooperative Principle (CP) in their communication. The interview of Ishaq Dar with the BBC, held in December 2020, was selected to analyse by applying Grice's (1975) four maxims to how politicians show uncooperativeness, as well as being untruthful in their discussion through non-observing the conversational maxims. The quantitative research methodology was used to explore the Grice maxims in Ishaq Dar's interview. The findings of the present study show the politicians flouted or violated the maxims of quantity, quality, relevance, and manner in the interview. The politicians, like Ishaq Dar usually flouted or violated the maxim of quantity to convey their political views to the public since the objective of the party is to convince individuals to decide in favour of them, regardless of whether what they were stating was not related to the posed inquiry in the interview. It would suggest that they had just arranged what to convince the audience regardless of the questions presented to them. Conclusively, political talks are mostly uncooperative, notwithstanding being untruthful to gain the favour of the masses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study attempts to bridge the gap between corpus linguistics and semantics by exploring semantic prosody in the corpora of American and Pakistani English songs. The study is based on comparative analysis of the semantic prosodies of lexical patterns in the songs. To achieve the objective of the study, corpora of Pakistani and American English songs are developed and then similar words are extracted from the developed wordlists of the corpus. The study highlights the linguistic contexts encoded in the semantic prosodies of the selected lexical items in the corpora of American and Pakistani English songs. American songs were selected from American Billboard from the year 2000 to 2015; whereas, all the available Pakistani English songs from 2000 to 2015 were selected. Lancsbox was used to explore the semantic association of lexical items. The findings of the study reveal different interesting themes extracted from different lexical patterns and the difference in semantic prosodies of similar lexical items in both the corpora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical bundles (LBs) are indispensable building blocks and essential constituents of academic discourse. The appropriate utilization of the lexical bundle's approach can effectively enhance students' understanding of academic discourse. LBs in various academic genres have extensively been studied concerning written and spoken language. However, less research has been conducted to explore the occurrence, nature, and frequency of LBs in Pakistani academic discourse, especially in textbooks. Therefore, the present study aims to explore four-word common LBs and their functional taxonomies employed in Pakistani Higher Secondary School Certificate (HSSC) level textbooks of Chemistry and Physics. A specialized corpus of these textbooks was built which was run on Antconc software for the identification and extraction of the LBs in the corpus. The classification of the identified LBs was then carried out utilizing Biber functional taxonomies of LBs. The study found 102 LBs occurring in the selected textbooks. In functional categories, there was a dominant use of discourse organizers and referential expressions. The findings related to frequent strings of words which can have significant educational implications for teachers, language material developers, and syllabus designers. The list of LBs with discourse functions provided by this study can significantly be used to enhance students' academic writing and their ability to comprehend different types of scientific texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language change, shift and death are dynamic processes which happen under several sociohistorical, demographic, geographic and linguistic metamorphoses in the world. The economic romance with China Pakistan Economic Corridor is considered to be a "game and fate changer" for the regions especially South Asia, South East Asia, Middle East and even Africa. Whether this economic consecration would also result into changes in social dynamics or consequences in the forms of linguistic apocalypse, socio-cultural cataclysm and evolution in the literary produce would become a serious cause of "game and fate changer" for linguistic ecology of the regions. Perhaps, the history has not observed and witnessed pidginization, creolization and hybridization of languages at such a large scale that CPEC is going to leave nothing more than a byproduct. Here we hypothesize that this by product would change the linguistic ecology of Pakistan altogether which poses serious challenges for language maintenance in different domains of its function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twitter as a tool for opinion-making, building repertoire, and winning fame has achieved its maximum use and influence especially by coming under the fingertips of the politicians. Its socio-political impact can easily be gauged by examining its role in various social and political situations. However, the role of social media tools especially Twitter has become very crucial and decisive in electoral campaigns all over the world in general and US presidential elections in particular. The social media wings, supporters of the political parties, hired companies, and the candidates themselves become very active users of the innovative use of Twitter for campaigning to win elections (Ferrara, Chang, Chen, Muric & Patel, 2020). The current study intends to explore concurrent themes/issues highlighted in tweets of Donald Trump and Joe Biden made during the 2020 presidential election campaign in the USA. Only the written tweets from September 02, 2020, to November 17, 2020, were collected for the analysis. Corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis as two methodological strands for data analysis and interpretations were used as analytical and theoretical frameworks respectively. These two strands were used to identify the discursive practices related to the construction and propagation of the political ideologies owned by Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The concordances of the six most frequent words were generated and analyzed in order to identify the most unique themes/issues to the election campaign. These themes include ideological stands of both candidates on Covid-19 policies, environmental issues, racial unrest, and othering each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differences in the language used by men and women have intrigued scholars since long. However, the use of corpus-based techniques for such research is infrequent, especially in Pakistan. After the advent of the concept of World Englishes, corpora are developed to show the identity of different countries, individuals, regions and areas of the world. Likewise, English spoken and written in Pakistan is different from the English language used in various countries/areas of the world. There is not only worldwide differences in spoken and written discourses, researches show that language used by men and women is also different. Therefore, this research aims at exploring lexical items used by men and women and ultimately developing Gender-based Pakistani Academic Word List (GPAWL). The research articles from three disciplines of social sciences (Education, History and English) published in HEC recognized research journal of Y category were collected. Academic word lists, occurrences/frequencies of lexical items and contextual uses of lexicons by Pakistani writers in research papers are explored through corpus-based techniques. The academic word list of male writers comprises of more words (124 words) than female writers (37 words). Variation in contextual use of language is explored by using lexical item language. The findings demonstrate the variations in language used by men and women in Pakistani written academic discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a multilingual country, Pakistan faces innumerable problems in language in education policy and medium of instruction in educational institutions (Ammar et al. 2015; Mehboob. 2017; Channa, Manan & David, 2020) There is an intellectual divide among the proponents of English, Urdu and regional languages. English is important for science and education while Urdu reflects the national sense of pride. A history of ethnic strife has also led to the rise of regional and provincial sense in the context of languages. This paper attempts to investigate attitudes towards these languages and the choice of language as a medium of instruction. The focus is to examine code switching or translanguaging in classrooms. The findings of the study are based on data generated though a questionnaire and audio/video recording of classroom lectures. Among the respondents of the study are included 300 students and 30 instructors of three educational universities in Islamabad. The survey conducted through questionnaire examines the attitude of students towards the use of language while classroom sessions have been recorded and transcribed to authenticate the quantitative data. The study reveals that there is no uniform approach to the use of language and variation in the respondents’ pattern of thinking. This cognitive persona of respondents shows that they are not decisive about choosing medium of instruction. The study recommends designing and implementation of the practice of translanguaging that maintains cultural pluralism and is flexible and accommodative to increase linguistic resources in an educational setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the recent past, considerable value has been given to pragmatic analysis by numerous linguists to interpret human speech such as Leech (2016), Morini (2016), Steinkrüger (2016) and Martin & Perez (2014). Relevance, an important element of pragmatic inquiry is a universal function of communication. From the Pragmatics viewpoint of relevance, two contributions are worth mentioning; Aristotle's Theory of syllogism and the Gricean maxim of relevance. Aristotle's ideology of logic concentrates on the notion of syllogism: the deduction (Steinkruger, 2015). Grice proposed the principle to probe relevance through his Maxim of relevance in his Cooperative Principle which suggests that speaker should remain relevant to the topic during conversation. This paper attempts to explore the effectiveness of Aristotle's Theory of syllogism and the Gricean maxim of relevance in determining the relevance of discourse in the classroom. The outcomes of the research are based on the data collected through recordings of thirty postgraduate classrooms. The total transcribed data comprised of 126341 words. The study reveals that Gricean maxim of relevance and Aristotle's theory of Syllogism are not pertinent in determining relevance in classroom discourse. Furthermore, this research is an effort to determine relevance in classroom discourse through a model proposed by us, Relative Relevance Model of Communication. Keeping in view the importance of context in pragmatic ideology, this study proposes the idea of direct and relative relevance to determine the relevance of discourse in classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

the recent past, considerable value has been given to pragmatic analysis by numerous linguists to interpret human speech such as Leech (2016), Morini (2016), Steinkriiger (2016) and Martin & Perez (2014). Relevance, an important element of pragmatic inquiry is a universal function of communication. From the Pragmatics view point of relevance, two contributions are worth mentioning; Aristotle's Theory' of the syllogism and Gricean maxim of relevance. Aristotle's ideology of logic concentrates on the notion of syllogism: the deduction (Steinkruger, 2015). Grice (1976) proposed the principle to probe relevance through his Maxim of relevance in his Cooperative Principle which suggests that speaker should remain relevant to the topic during conversation. This paper attempts to explore the effectiveness of Aristotle's Theory of the syllogism and Gricean maxim of relevance in determining the relevance in classroom discourse. The findings of the study are based on the data collected through recordings of thirty postgraduate classrooms. The total transcribed data comprised of 126341 words. The study reveals that Gricean maxim of relevance and Aristotle's theory of Syllogism are not pertinent in determining relevance in classroom discourse. Furthermore this research is an effort to determine relevance in classroom discourse by designing a model named as Relative Relevance Model of Communication. Keeping in view the importance of context in pragmatic ideology, this study proposes the idea of direct and relative relevance to determine relevance in classrooms discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]