LINGUISTIC VARIATION ACROSS DISCIPLINES IN PAKISTANI ACADEMIC WRITING: A MULTIDIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS

Abstract

Pakistani English being an indigenous variety has its distinctive registers, which exhibit variation at different levels of language. Pakistani academic writing as a register is an area that needs to be probed into for exploring its internal as well as external variation. Biber (1988) proposed multidimensional analysis as the most suitable approach for register variation studies and stressed the importance of co-occurring linguistic features. Based on the multidimensional analysis of Biber’s 1988 study, the present research strives to identify co-occurring linguistic features that account for the cross disciplinary variation in Pakistani academic writing. For this purpose, the study relies on 235 research dissertations of M.Phil and PhD graduates representing three major disciplines (Humanities, Social Sciences and Sciences) as a sample of Pakistani academic writing. The data was analyzed through the process of tagging of linguistic features, frequency counts, standardization and calculation of dimension scores and ANOVA. The findings reveal no statistically significant differences among disciplines on Biber’s five dimensions and that all the three disciplines are highly informational, non-narrative, explicit, non-persuasive and impersonal in the production of Pakistani academic discourse.