Linguistic Variation Over Time

A Comparative Study of British and Pakistani's Newspaper Editorials

Abstract

The present research attempts to compare the linguistic variation which occurred during the last many decades in British and Pakistani press editorials. The objectives of this study are to describe how the language of editorials varies through different phases of time and to investigate how far the language of Pakistani editorials varies from that of British press editorials diachronically across Biber’s 1988 textual dimensions. A comparable diachronic corpus of Pakistani newspaper editorials was developed to meet these objectives. Biber’s Multidimensional Analysis, which combines quantitative and functional approaches and applies multivariate statistical techniques to study the linguistic features across text varieties, was employed to compare and contrast the linguistic variation during the period of time. The comparison shows that British press editorials are less informational, non-narrative with a tendency towards narrative discourse, situation-dependent, overt in argumentation and impersonal in discourse production, whereas, Pakistani press editorials are highly informational, non-narrative, explicit and covert in argumentation. Moreover, like British press editorials, Pakistani press editorials are impersonal in discourse production. The comparison shows that significant linguistic differences are found between both Pakistani and British press editorials registers indicating that both the registers exhibit their unique linguistic characteristics with respect to their independent varieties of British and Pakistani English.