Transitivity in Pakistani English: A Corpus-based Approach towards Mapping Frequency Profiles

Abstract

This paper aims at building frequency profiles based on transitivity patterns of a small number of text corpora belonging to Pakistani English newspaper editorials. The profiles have been built by using UAM Corpus Tool (O’ Donnell, 2008) to explore transitivity features. The empirical analysis then has been compared with the frequency profiles of English language (Matthiessen, 2006 and Stubbs, 1996) to establish common features. The present work draws inspiration by Michael Halliday who is known as one of the pioneer corpus linguists since his early work on the Chinese language (Halliday 1956, cited in Halliday 1993). Mapping his (ibid) study on the BNC model he concluded that the relative frequencies of past and non-past are about 50-50 and the relative frequencies of positive and negative are about 9-1 (reported in Halliday 1993). Similarly, the present study looks closer to Standard English, and this is partially because the editorials are written by professional writers, and are well edited before printing.