Muhammad Shakir Aziz

Member of the Graduate School Empirical and Applied Linguistics from 2016 until 2020.

Dissertationproject

A Corpus based Comparison of Variation in Online Registers of Pakistani English using MD analysis

The advent and popularity of the internet has created a host of new registers in (Pakistani) English. It provides a unique place of interaction between users of English regardless of their national origins. This phenomenon can cause similarities between online registers of different national varieties of English, at the same time linguistic features unique to offline registers of a variety can also be present in these online registers. The online registers of Pakistani English have not been studied until now, which the present study aims to do. The Multidimensional Analysis (MDA) framework is suitable for the study of such variation. Biber (1988)’s 5 Dimension MDA model will be used to compare the online registers of Pakistani English with equivalent registers in U.S. English to determine variation due to national origin. As a second step, the same model will be used to compare online registers of Pakistani and U.S. Englishes with similar offline registers of the respective varieties. This two-step comparison will help understand the effect of the internet on variation between online versus offline and native versus non-native register varieties. The variation within the online registers of Pakistani English will be explored by conducting a new Factor Analysis (i.e. a new MDA) to calculate new dimensions of variation. Furthermore, a Principal Component Analysis will be conducted to identify clusters of texts (or text types) based on dimension scores of individual texts. The data will consist of online registers of Pakistani English (News Blogs, Individual Blogs, Technology Blogs, Multi-writer Blogs, Facebook Groups, Facebook Status Updates, and Twitter Tweets). The same registers from U.S. English will be collected. The data for similar offline registers i.e. News Reports, Opinion Columns and Conversational Texts (of both Pakistani and U.S. Englishes) will be collected from existing corpora of the respective variety. Online Access [en]