REGISTER VARIATION IN PAKISTANI WRITTEN ENGLISH: A MULTIDIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS

Abstract

Pakistani English has its distinctive character as a non-native variety of English and it is used for various functions in the country. The present study is an effort to study these variant uses of Pakistani English by focusing on register variation of Pakistani Written English (PWE) using multidimensional (MD) approach (Biber, 1988). Earlier studies have focused on individual registers and specialized corpora of PWE but the present study has been conducted on a general-purpose corpus of PWE (2.1 million words) consisting of 29 registers. The register variation has been studied using Biber’s 1988 model of MD analysis. To conduct MD analysis, the corpus was tagged using Biber tagger at Northern Arizona University, U.S.A. The register variation of PWE has been studied along five dimensions of Biber’s 1988 model. It has been observed that PWE registers show great deal of variation in terms of their scores on different dimensions and do not form a consistent pattern of variation across all the dimensions. Most of PWE registers have been found informational on dimension 1, non-narrative on dimension 2, explicit on dimension 3, lack overt expression of persuasion on dimension 4 and present abstract informational discourse on dimension 5. It is interesting to note that registers having informational character on dimension 1 show explicit character on dimension 3 and registers having interactive character on dimension 1 show situation-dependent character on dimension 3. It can be concluded that PWE users make different linguistic choices for different linguistic situations.