Linguistics and Literature Review

(Re)constructing the Notion of Identity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies: A Diasporic Study of Selected Stories

Farkhanda Shahid Khan — 2023-08-08

The current study poses its focus on the complexities of diasporic tensions, especially concentrating on the reductive methods, contributing towards the homogenization of the formed and consolidated cultural and national identities. The concept of nationalism has often been utilized by third-world countries to express their views of cultural hegemony. However, the current research aims to provide an alternate perspective concerning globalization and cosmopolitanism. Furthermore, this study presents a diasporic picture of Lahiri’s characters celebrating multiculturalism and transnationalism. This study draws its foundation from Postcolonialism as a theoretical framework along with other concepts of leading theorists to conduct a close textual analysis of the selected works. Moreover, this study aims to analyze the representations of cultural and national identities in the characters of the selected text whom Lahiri puts in the in-between space of nation and identity, where they represent multiple cultures and histories. By so doing, Lahiri rejects the appeal to original accounts, which unfold cultural identities, while attempting to break and reconstruct the foremost chronicle of the nation. In the selected text, the Interpreter of Maladies (1999) nation and home are re-imagined not as a monolithic or stagnant space but rather as a precisely created structure, transformed and confronted, and resultantly shaping identities in a struggle. Consequently, the re-constructed diasporic approach unveils a deep crack in the consolidated unity and arises, instead, with multiple identities, which in Lahiri’s terms must be accepted, while coming out of the rhetoric of nationalism.

Analyzing Recent (2019) Kashmir Socio-Political Issue: A Voyant Sentiment Analysis of Tweets

Saba Zaidi — 2023-09-13

Computational Textual Analysis (CTA) is an effective way to analyze large texts by incorporating computational tools, such as, Voyant. The current study takes computer-assisted textual analysis (mixed method) to investigate the sentiments on tweets through Voyant computational method, in order to grasp the emotions of the global public who have tweeted about the recent (2019) Kashmir issue. This research is based on the conceptual framework of Ortony, Clore, and Collins (OCC) model and the keyword approach. For this purpose, different tweets have been analyzed to check the level of sentiments as either positive, negative or neutral. The findings suggested that sentiments were neutral towards the issue of Kashmir and negative towards the Indian government. Voyant has also presented the word count, density, and correlation of phrases within the larger text context. Voyant procedures like; cirrus, trend and summary showed the results based on quantitative and qualitative measures. These toolsets are easy to use without any programming skills and seem to be the best for researchers of social sciences and humanities who are trying to work in digital humanities. The study also recommends Voyant as an operative tool for textual analysis for Computational Linguists, Postmodernism, Critical Discourse Analysis, English Literature, History, Sociology, Theology, and any other field of knowledge that falls under the domain of digital humanities.

Hybridisation and Lexical Variation: An In-depth Analysis of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Farwa Qazalbash — 2023-09-14

Hybridization and lexical variation are phenomena that are prevalent in many cultural domains, which as a process define the instances of hybridity in language and culture. The current study aims to investigate the variation English language in Arundhati Roy’s, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness to study the incorporation of code mixing between L1 (Hindi-Urdu) and L2 (English). This research also investigates how code-mixing results in lexical variation and hybridization in the context of South Asian languages. The findings of this research revealed that) the writer borrowed words, phrases, and sentences from both Hindi and Urdu languages to construct a specific form of hybrid identity. She frequently uses metaphorical language as an organism to convey its social and cultural backgrounds, indicating a linguistic hybridity submerged within a cultural context. Additionally, the findings also indicated that most of the borrowings stem from various sources, such as religion, cuisines, clothing, poetry, caste systems, and untranslatable expressions. Roy in particular resists translation of expressions, such as ‘Razai (Quilt), Masjid (Mosque), Baba (Father), and Inqilaab (Revolution) to create nuances of meaning embedded in the South Asian cultural context. Thus, the findings also revealed that the hybrid use of language by South Asian writers is in actual an attempt to reject the normative hegemony of Standard English and promote Hindi-English and Pakistani-English as an idea of celebrating hybrid identity.

Paraphrase and Definition: Two Translation Techniques in Conveying Islamic Economic and Financial Terminology in Arabic-English Dictionaries

Antar Fuad Ali — 2023-09-30

This paper aims to investigate the frequency of two prevailing translation techniques in the bilingual lexicographic context, which analyzes the Arabic and English writings with a specific focus on Islamic financial and economic terms (IFETs). Furthermore, it attempts to report the preferences of dictionary users who are either translators or translation students. For this purpose, a monolingual dictionary specialized in IFETs was carried out to conduct the analysis, out of which, one hundred terms were randomly selected. These terms were analyzed referentially and technically. Additionally, a search of translational equivalents in two Arabic-English specialized dictionaries was carried out. The IFETs with no entries in the said bilingual dictionaries were rendered into English by using two translation techniques, namely paraphrasing and definition techniques. The results revealed that paraphrasing using a related word was the most frequently used technique than the definition technique. The meanings of 31 terms were adequately conveyed via paraphrasing technique, while only one term was translated with a definition technique. Thus, this study pointed out the pertinent role of the paraphrasing technique in solving the untranslatability of many deeply cultural-bound terms. However, a preliminary survey was conducted to fulfill this study's second aim, which showed that most of the respondents preferred to utilize definitional technique, instead of paraphrasing.

Exploring Language Learning through Culture: Indigenisation of English in a Pakistani Context

Hafiz Nauman Ahmed — 2023-09-30

The study aims to explore the cultural facets of learning and using English language in a Pakistani context. Drawing on information collected from participants, the study also indicates the present status of the indigenisation of English in Pakistan. This mixed-method research used a convenience sampling strategy to collect data from 476 students through a questionnaire and from 15 teachers through semi-structured interviews. The findings of the study revealed that there is little explicit focus on culture during the teaching and learning of the English language. The collected data also show that students learn the target culture more than the local culture, mainly due to the use of foreign teaching materials. Moreover, both students and teachers seem ambivalent about the Indigenisation of English in Pakistan, although a shift in the status of English can be observed in its teaching and learning processes. The study further suggested to develop materials based on the local context in order to incorporate local culture and make English more indigenous.

Exploration of Logical Meta-functions in ICLE: An Analysis of Pakistani Argumentative Essays

Attia Rasool — 2023-09-30

Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) studies how a language functions in a social context, concerning the meaning of clauses at three different levels: interpersonal, ideational, and textual. The aim of this corpus-based research is to find out the logical structures of clauses in Pakistani academic writings by evaluating two main elements of clause complexity: taxis and logico-semantics relations. For this purpose, Halliday & Matthiessen’s (2014) system of clause complexing was employed as an analytical framework. A sample size of 100 argumentative essays was taken from the ICLE corpus, which was written by Pakistani students. This corpus was annotated by using the UAM corpus tool manually. Furthermore, the comparative distributions of different types of clause complexes were studied and evaluated accordingly. It helped to identify and understand lexico-grammatical variations at the clause level in non-native Pakistani academic writings. The findings showed that Pakistani students composed hypotactic and paratactic with almost the same ratio in their writing with a minor deviation. They also tend to build different types of logico-semantic relations of clauses during the argumentation; however, the occurrences of expansion were high in contrast to projection. The null hypothesis was tested by deploying the Wilcoxon signed rank test. It revealed no significant difference between paratactic and hypotactic approaches. However, their various logico-semantic relations displayed significant differences (p<0.05).

An Orthographic Analysis of Sound Changing Rules in the Urdu Language

Tania Ali Khan — 2023-09-30

The current study aims to determine the sound-changing rules in the Urdu language and their underlying causes. For this purpose, words that exhibited distinct pronunciations as compared to their written forms were selected for the study. A list of 500 words was prepared from the Urdu dictionary "Feeroz-ul-Lughat," and twenty (20) proficient Urdu language speakers were selected to articulate these chosen words. The study’s analysis was divided into three stages, namely recording, transcribing, and examining the speakers' pronunciations to identify the sound changing patterns; consulting the dictionary for standard transcriptions; and phonetically and orthographically transcribing and examining the selected words. The findings revealed various contextual occurrences in which phonological changes had occurred. Additionally, after a thorough examination, the evidence supporting or contradicting the existing sound-changing rules was explored through the selected words from the Urdu language. Markedly, this study aims to enhance the understanding of the phonological dynamics in spoken Urdu expressions as well as the major factors contributing to sound changes in the Urdu language.