This paper aims at identifying socio-cultural portrayal of women through representational, interactive and compositional meanings with a focus on gender stereotypes propagated by media advertisements in Pakistan. Media adverts as such are an instrumental tool for manipulating attitudes and behavior of large and diverse audience for example, a large body of data reveals that women are portrayed in media to stylize their physical attributes to tempt and persuade customers. Therefore, advertisements are instrumental in creating a certain mind-set by shaping an ideologythrough highlighting the hegemonic representation of men and sexual objectification of women for creating an erotic fantasy. The data for the study comprises print media adverts which were randomly collected to have primarily advertised Pakistan TV morning shows, home products and cosmetics and have been selected on an assumption that they embody a socio-cultural perspective. The findings show that the selected advertsproject the world of male chauvinism where women are shown as the facilitating sexual objects.

The present study is an attempt to identify and address political polarization and shaming in the language of the political discourse of Pakistan on social media. It is an endeavour to examine the hidden patterns in the linguistic choices of politicians for the production, maintenance, and prorogation of their institutional identities. The methodological framework of the study is Norman Fairclough’s (1995) three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis which is employed to analyze polarization and shaming in the language of social media by focusing on the General Assembly Elections of Gilgit-Baltistan held on November 15, 2020. The data has been taken from the Twitter accounts of three parties and their representatives including Pakistan Tehreek-e Insaf, Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz Sharif), and Pakistan People's Party. The research data is related to political discourse as it consists of linguistic elements regarding the production, development, dissemination, and maintenance of power, ideology and institutional value. The findings of this study unfold that discourse is an integral component of every individual, group, institute, and nation that produces, promotes and maintains the ideological identity through legitimizing their actions and executing their power. Furthermore, tweets are constructed, formulated, propagated, maintained, and legitimized through ideologically guided power structures and discursive patterns.

This paper examines relational practice in multilingual peer discourse to inspect the distinct identity patterns of the male and the female participants involved in gender dynamics. There is  a growing impetus of discourse studies as an emerging area of sociolinguistic and ethno methodological research. In this paper, talk as a marker of gender identity is explored in the light of the theoretical framework suggested by Holmes (2006) who studies the different relational strategies of male and female interlocutors in workplace environment. In the current study, conversations of six male and female postgraduate students of English language at Sargodha University, Pakistan are recorded and transcribed to see how the participants create team as a relational practice using gender specific norms via talk. The study has found that the males create team through humor in discourse while females tilt towards small talk and frequent verbal gestures of approval. Moreover, masculinities and femininities of the peers are manifested in their style and function of the conversations. The study is significant because it is going to lay a foundation for the study and exploration of gender integrated conversations in multilingual context in Pakistani English and other varieties spoken in casual talk in Pakistan.

This paper aims at evaluating journalist voice in the Pakistani print media discourse. Journalists are supposed to make valuefree reporting, but the analysis of  newspaper texts shows that the journalists appraise and the news reports voice newspapers’ stance  (Bednarek, 2006). Therefore, media discourses always present a particular left or rightwing stance loaded with subjective evaluations (White and Thompson, 2008). While previous studies have focused on reportage phenomena of different news genres and perspective comparisons with a primary focus on language in the context of politics for an ideology, this paper explores evaluative patterns - based on the appraisal framework (Martin and White, 2005) of discourse analysis developed within Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014) with a focus on appraisal domains of attitude, engagement and graduation - in Pakistani news reporting to find a reporter voice. The analysis shows that the said news reporting is not value free.

This study aims at exploring Pakistani English as a multicultural language and the importance of grasping the reality of intercultural competence in English language teaching (ELT). It conceptualizes Pakistani English as a multicultural language in terms of the Three Concentric Circles model suggested by B. B. Kachru (1985). Innovative changes and deviations have been recognized as indigenized features of Pakistani English that emerge due to the influence of L1 and the Pakistani cultural context. This is a theory-based content analysis of textbooks of English taught at IX and X grades in schools of the four provinces in Pakistan. An analysis of lexical stereotypes in Pakistani English is carried out to explore a multicultural dimension of Pakistani English. Recruiting the notion of Pakistani English as a multicultural language this study suggests that representation of Pakistani culture in the textbooks elevates intercultural competence to fill the gap in cultural diversity using English in ELT.