Analyzing Linguistic Variations In The Discussion Sections Of Pakistani English Research Articles: A Multidimensional Study

Abstract

This study investigated linguistic variations to establish the legitimacy of Pakistani English as a distinct variety. The corpus comprised 70 discussion sections from Pakistani English research articles distributed across three academic disciplines (engineering, information technology, and literature). The analysis was conducted using Multidimensional Analysis Tagger v.1.1, which scrutinized 67 grammatical features across five dimensions. The results revealed significant differences in dimensions 1, 3, and 5 which indicated variations in Pakistani English. The results also showed the discussion sections: being highly informative, formal, abstract, and explicit in engineering; informative, and abstract in information technology; and less informative, explicit, and abstract in literature research articles. However, the results displayed fewer variations in dimensions 2, and 4 which suggested them being interesting for further research. Overall, this research contributed to our understanding of the linguistic variations in Pakistani English and its distinct characteristics across academic disciplines.