Linguistic Forum (LinFo) (E-Journal)
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Pragmatics of Code-Switching in Pakistani Comedy Talk Shows: A Corpus Based Analysis
No full textThis study investigates the pragmatic functions of Urdu–Punjabi code-switching in the Pakistani comedy talk show Khabarhar (خبرہار) using Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986, 1995) as the analytical framework. Adopting a corpus-based mixed-methods approach, the study analyzes how code-switching operates at the levels of cognitive effort, cognitive effects, and audience-oriented pragmatic impact in televised humorous discourse. A spoken corpus was compiled from selected recent episodes of the program, systematically transcribed, and annotated. The data were manually coded and analyzed using MAXQDA, combining qualitative pragmatic interpretation with frequency-based patterns of code-switching functions. The findings demonstrate that Urdu–Punjabi code-switching serves as a strategic pragmatic resource that enhances humor by reducing processing effort, increasing contextual relevance, and activating shared cultural schemas. Code-switching frequently occurs at punchlines and evaluative moments, generating humor through linguistic contrast, unexpected shifts, and localized cultural resonance. This study contributes to the growing body of research on bilingual humor and media pragmatics in South Asian contexts by empirically demonstrating how code-switching functions as a relevance-optimizing strategy in televised comedy discourse. The findings offer implications for pragmatics, media linguistics, and humor studies, particularly in multilingual broadcast settings
Refining and Validating Paul Nation’s Vocabulary Size Test for TOEFL Candidates in Pakistan: An Item Discrimination and Predictive Validity Study
No full textThe purpose of this study is to refine and validate Paul Nation's Vocabulary Size Test (VST) to better meet the vocabulary assessment needs of TOEFL candidates. There is also a lack of research regarding the predictive validity of the VST in the context of TOEFL exams. The primary objectives of this study were to (1) conduct item discrimination analysis to evaluate how effectively individual items of the VST distinguish among students with different levels of vocabulary proficiency, (2) assess the internal consistency reliability of the refined test, and (3) examine the predictive validity of the test in relation to students’ performance in the TOEFL exam. The study employed a combination of purposive and convenience sampling and involved 336 TOEFL candidates from various institutions in Punjab (Pakistan). The original VST developed by Nation and Beglar (2007) was administered, and item analysis was carried out using facility and discrimination indices. Items with facility values between 0.30 and 0.70 and discrimination values of 0.40 or above were retained, resulting in a refined 58-item version of the test. Reliability analysis yielded a Cronbach’s alpha of α = 0.94, indicating high internal consistency. To evaluate predictive validity, a simple linear regression was conducted using scores from the refined VST and TOEFL exam results obtained from a subsample of 30 TOEFL candidates. The results showed a strong, statistically significant relationship (Model 2: R² = .90, Adjusted R² = .90, p < .001). These findings have important implications for test developers, educators, and researchers in Pakistan, offering a more reliable vocabulary assessment tool with direct relevance to TOEFL preparation and predictive modelling of TOEFL performance
An Analysis of How Women’s Rights Are Framed in Pakistani English Newspapers: A Corpus-Based Discourse Study
No full textThis research examines women's rights framing within Pakistani English newspapers with a focus on how the media shapes popular perception and social norms. While the media can work to further gender equality, it tends to offer one-sided and sometimes contradictory depictions of women's rights based on cultural, political, and ideological variables. Past studies have had the tendency of studying English media in isolation, overlooking a dedicated examination of English-language newspapers in Pakistan. This study rectifies this by drawing on an integrated model of analysis that combines Goffman’s micro-level framing theory and Entman’s macro-level framing framework. Drawing on corpus-based discourse analysis, the study examines the linguistic and rhetorical strategies of framing women's rights, with a view to identifying the cultural and ideological constituents that influence these narratives. This study shows that there are different framing patterns employed in Pakistani English dailies, echoing wider society-based divisions. This study makes a contribution to media and gender studies by providing a better understanding of how women’s rights are framed within the English-language media and generates practical recommendations for policymakers and activists seeking to promote more balanced and inclusive portrayals of women's rights. This research highlights the role of media framing in generating social awareness and promoting gender equality interventions
An Ecolinguistic Analysis of Metaphorical Representation of Tropical Storm Megi in Philippine News Discourse: A Corpus-Based Study
No full textThis study examines the range of metaphors employed by Philippine news channels to represent Tropical Storm Agaton in news discourse. It explores how these metaphors frame the storm as friendly, destructive, or neutral in relation to the ecology and ecosystems upon which life depends. Adopting a qualitative research design, the study draws data from two major Philippine news networks, GMA Network and ABS-CBN. News reports on Tropical Storm Agaton were collected from these channels, and a corpus of 40,786 words was compiled for analysis. The data were analysed using AntConc 3.5.9 (Anthony, 2020). The study is theoretically grounded in Stibbe’s (2015) Stories Framework and Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The findings reveal that Tropical Storm Agaton is constructed through a variety of metaphors, including Agaton as a killer, a relentless destroyer, a rampaging beast, a burying force, a reluctant traveller, and a haphazard painter. These metaphorical representations personify the storm as a violent and antagonistic entity, foregrounding its destructive potential and capacity to cause death and damage. The study demonstrates that such metaphors largely promote a destructive environmental narrative, reinforcing the portrayal of nature as a hostile force while marginalising broader systemic factors, particularly climate change, that contribute to extreme weather events. The study concludes that the dominant use of these metaphors risks obscuring the underlying causes of natural disasters and highlights the need for alternative conceptualisations that encourage more sustainable and resilient responses to climate change
Diachronic Variation in Pakistani English Sports News: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis
No full textThis study investigates linguistic variation in Sports News (SN) across three decades (1995–2004, 2005–2014, and 2015–2021) in Pakistani English newspapers. Employing a corpus-based approach and Biber’s (1988, 2004) Multidimensional Analysis (MDA) framework, the research examines co-occurring linguistic features to identify stylistic dimensions and diachronic shifts within the SN sub-register. A corpus of 1,693 Sports News articles, totaling approximately 1.9 million words and spanning three decades (1995–2021), was compiled from major Pakistani English newspapers to examine diachronic linguistic variation. The findings indicate that earlier SN texts exhibit more involved, elaborated, and affective linguistic tendencies, characterized by subordination, longer lexical items, and markers of personal stance, aligning them with narrative storytelling. Over time, SN transitions toward a more informational and compressed style, featuring higher lexical density, increased nominalisation, and expanded noun phrase usage, reflecting a professionalised, report-oriented approach. Despite this shift, explicit referencing, evaluative phrasing, and interpretive elements persist, ensuring analytical depth and narrative framing. This study demonstrates that the linguistic evolution of Pakistani English Sports News is systematic, multidimensional, and responsive to changing journalistic conventions and audience expectations, balancing concise fact reporting with evaluative and interpretive commentary
A Linguistic Analysis of Administrative Place Names in Ba Dinh District, Hanoi, Vietnam
No full textHanoi’s Ba Dinh District, as the political and historical heart of Vietnam’s capital, offers a multifaceted toponymic landscape reflecting national heritage. This study examines the linguistic patterns, semantic categories, and cultural significance of Ba Dinh’s official place names, including ward names, street names, and residential group names to reveal underlying naming trends. Through a combined quantitative and qualitative analysis of approximately 264 toponyms, key patterns emerge. Commemorative names honoring historical figures and events form the largest group, underscoring Ba Dinh’s role in preserving national memory. Traditional locality names (e.g. old villages, craft guilds) and landmark-related names also contribute significantly, while trade-related street names, so prominent in Hanoi’s Old Quarter – are less common in Ba Dinh. The linguistic structure of these names shows a predominance of two-syllable compounds consistent with Vietnamese naming conventions, and a majority of names derived from Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary reflecting Vietnam’s linguistic heritage. Over time, Ba Dinh’s place names have evolved through colonial and revolutionary periods, with many older names replaced by new ones commemorating heroes and milestones of the 20th century. By situating Ba Dinh’s naming practices in historical context and comparing them to patterns in Hoan Kiem District, this paper highlights how urban toponyms serve as “living testimonies” of history and culture, balancing the preservation of local heritage with the imprint of political change. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of urban toponymy as a tool for cultural heritage preservation and collective memory in Hanoi’s urban development
Reframing Climate Change Narratives in Pakistan: A Critical Ecolinguistic and Multimodal Discourse Analysis
Get PDFClimate change discourse, becoming progressively multimodal in character, requires critical scrutiny of the interaction between language and images in creating ecological narratives. In Pakistan, a climate-impacted country, government language influences public understanding and ecological identity. This study critically examines how the Ministry of Climate Change Pakistan employs semiotic resources to frame climate narratives on its official website. Using Stibbe’s ecolinguistic framework and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual grammar, six visuals (2022–2023) were analyzed through a qualitative lens. The findings reveal strategic use of urgency metaphors, national-global identity synthesis, and multimodal cohesion to promote eco-consciousness and public responsibility. The research argues that these discursive choices not only reflect Pakistan's environmental vulnerabilities but also aim to construct a persuasive, collective ecological ethos aligned with global sustainability discourses. This work extends critical ecolinguistic analysis by prioritizing how visual textual synergies function in government climate discourse and contributes practical insights to discourse analysts, policymakers, and environmental planners working to strengthen eco-advocacy through combined semiotic strategies
Emojis, Hashtags, and Code-Switching: A Literary-Linguistic Analysis of Multimodal Digital Textuality
No full textThis article examines emojis, hashtags, and code-switching as core semiotic resources in twenty-first-century digital communication rather than peripheral embellishments. Drawing on a qualitative multimodal discourse analysis, we analyze a purposefully sampled corpus of 300 public posts from Twitter/X and Instagram (2021–2023) selected via the keywords MeToo, WorkLifeBalance, and StudentLife; posts were included if they contained at least one emoji and evidence of a hashtag or code-switching. Analysis proceeded in three stages: (1) identifying the linguistic/pragmatic functions of each resource; (2) interpreting their aesthetic and literary affordances; and (3) situating their interaction within broader sociocultural frameworks. Findings indicate that emojis primarily index stance and tone—including patterned uses of affect and irony—while hashtags operate as indexical “refrains” that structure participation and intertextual linkage; intrasentential and tag-level code-switching, in turn, performs identity work and audience design, producing polyphonic, hybrid utterances. Taken together, these resources foreground the multimodal, participatory character of contemporary textuality, complicating canonical distinctions between speech and writing. The study argues for treating online discourse as both a linguistic phenomenon and a vernacular literary form, and outlines implications for sociolinguistics (integrating translanguaging and multimodality into analytic units) and literary studies (extending close reading to networked, ephemeral texts)
Translation Trends in 21st Century: A Corpus Based Descriptive Study of Selected Urdu Translations
No full textThis study presents a bibliometric analysis of translation trends in Pakistan during the twenty-first century, focusing specifically on Urdu translations produced over the past two decades. Adopting a quantitative approach, the study examines five key variables: dominant genres, prevailing themes, years of publication of original works and their Urdu translations, and the original source languages. Data processing and visualization are conducted using Visual Operating System (VOS) viewer, with bibliometric maps generated for each variable to illustrate the most frequently occurring values. Findings reveal that the most commonly translated genres are non-fiction, novels, and short stories, followed by biographies, autobiographies, and poetry. Dominant thematic areas include history, feminism, and philosophy, with politics, postcolonialism, war, Islamic beliefs, power struggles, cultural discourse, and psychological issues also appearing prominently. The frequency of Urdu translations has notably increased in recent years, with a consistent upward trend observed from 2014 to 2020. Works published from as early as 340 BC to the present day have been translated into Urdu, though more recent publications show a higher rate of translation. English emerges as the most frequently translated source language, followed by Persian, Arabic, Russian, German, Hindi, Bengali, and Portuguese. The study concludes by suggesting that the dataset holds potential for further empirical research within the fields of linguistics and translation studies
Identity Construction through Naming and Describing: A Critical Stylistic Analysis of Major Political Party Manifestos in Pakistan’s 2018 General Elections
No full textThe relationship between political language and meaning-making has been a central concern in linguistics and discourse studies. Building on this tradition, Jeffries’ Critical Stylistics offers a systematic framework that connects theoretical insights with close textual analysis at the lexical and grammatical levels. This study investigates how political identities are constructed in the 2018 general election manifestos of three major Pakistani political parties: Pakistan Muslim League (N), Pakistan People’s Party, and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, through the textual-conceptual function of Naming and Describing. Adopting a mixed-method approach, the study combines qualitative stylistic analysis with descriptive frequency-based measures to examine patterns of noun choice, nominal modification, and nominalisation. The findings indicate that ideologically salient nominal references are strategically employed to foreground positive self-representation while comparatively limiting representations of political rivals. Although all three parties privilege self-oriented naming practices, variation is observed in the extent and distribution of these strategies across manifestos. The study demonstrates the analytical value of Critical Stylistics for examining political texts in the Pakistani context and provides a replicable framework for future research on identity construction across electoral periods