Linguistic Variations in the Abstracts of Pakistani Dissertations: A Multidimensional Analysis across Disciplines

Abstract

This mixed-method, corpus-based study investigates across disciplinary variations in the abstracts of Pakistani dissertations spanning 16 disciplines in the light of Biber's multidimensional analysis approach. While prior research has explored variations in the academic register of Pakistani English, a focused study on the abstract section has largely been ignored. Addressing this oversight, this research is conducted on a specially developed corpus of 72,702 words and analyzed using the MAT tagger. The findings indicate that, although there are evident disciplinary variations, the abstracts predominantly exhibit characteristics of being informational, non-narrative, context-independent, and non-persuasive. Notably, distinct variations emerged across disciplines in D3 (Dimension 3), D4, and D5, with Law as a notable outlier. These results support the idea that Pakistani English is a separate linguistic entity with unique characteristics.

Keywords

• abstracts
• academic prose
• across-disciplinary variations
• multidimensional analysis
• pakistani english