Dictatorial rule has been a serious threat to the progress of most of the under-developed part of the world. Since Latin America constitutes a substantial part of the Third World and is mostly governed by either civil or military dictators, the causes and effects of dictatorial rule have been a favourite subject of the fiction writers of this region. The magical-realist fiction writers have been most eloquent in highlighting flaws inherent in such type of governments, weather in Chile, Colombia, Argentina, or Venezuela. García Márquez’s novel The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975/2007) is a protest against the dictatorial system in Latin America. The present study deals with the way García Márquez used the technique of magical realism to establish that autocrats and despotic rulers are a challenge to the development of a place and prosperity of its people. The close-reading approach/technique has been adopted to determine the causes and effects of dictatorial rule in the miniature world of the selected novel and the way it can be generalized vis-à-vis the contemporary circumstances of the Third World countries. Keywords: Third world, dictatorial rule, magical realism, close-reading, Latin America

This study unveils some strategies deployed by James Joyce to manipulate the reader when they experience textual patterns to decipher meaning from the text. Investigating Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this study delves into how the reader is pragmatically positioned and cognitively (mis)directed as Joyce guides their attention and influences their judgment. Thus, the text is a tool in the hand of the reader which evokes certain responses in readers and makes them invest time and struggle in understanding the text. Joyces use of speech categories and their speech acts or their summaries are crucial determining factors for the scales and corresponding modes of discourse presentation (Semino and Short 2004,p.19). The study concludes by providing the significant and functional role of the interplay between two highly complex discourse phenomena: speech acts and discourse presentation.

The language of law is complex and needs to be investigated to facilitate its easy understanding. The present study addresses this need by analyzing a mini-corpus comprising two short texts taken from Pakistan's Code of Civil Procedure 1908 and the U.K.'s Civil Procedure Rules 1998 with Halliday's ideational metafunction, which is suited for analyzing procedural texts (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). The study identified the transitivity patterns in the mini corpus. The findings showed simpler construction of processes in the U.K. civil procedure text sample as compared to Pakistan's Civil Procedure text sample, whereas the analysis showed a similar complex construction of nominal phrases in both texts. The study is expected to contribute toward an easy understanding of legal language. It is also hoped that this study will promote further research in this important area with pedagogical implications.

The present article attempts to analyze the interaction between categories of speech and thought in James Joyce's Dubliners quantitatively and qualitatively by applying Leech and Short Model (1981/2007). Excerpts of 2000word length have been randomly selected and manually tagged to have the accurate annotation keeping in mind the contextual potential to recognize discourse categories in Joyce fiction and then corpus software AntConc (Laurence Anthony 2018) was used to get quantitative results. The present study is grounded within three separate but interrelated disciplines: Stylistics, Discourse Analysis, and Narratology. It is difficult to imagine an example of a narrative that does not contain a reference to or a quotation of someone's speech or thoughts. To a large extent, the way we perceive a story depends upon the ways discourse is presented. This is something hard to demarcate the boundaries between them as the various modes have the potential to slip into one another. Special emphasis is given to variations between the three modes as well as to the instances of ambiguity created by their interplay. The article also compares findings with those described in Semino and Short (2004) for their corpus of 20th-century narrative fiction.