Locating departure from standard english: A comparison of periodized data of pakistani press editorials with british press editorials

This paper compares the patterns of change in Pakistani press editorials over a period of time in relation to the British press editorials. The objective of this exploratory research is to study which phase - soon after independence from British colonisation, after two decades as an independent country or the recent times of globalisation, capitalism, cultural imperialism and other instruments of neo-imperialism - resembles to or differs from British press editorials. To achieve this objective, Biber's Multi-dimensional (MD) model was used. Biber (1991) shows that different grammatical categories occur in the first 200 words and very few grammatical categories occur after 600 words. The corpus used for this study consists of 120 (153,450 words) Pakistani press editorials in English from three phases: 1947-1951, 1971-1975, 2012- 2016. The periodized data from Pakistani press editorials was compared with MD results of British press editorials drawn by Biber (1988) in his seminal study. Biber's tagger was used to tag data. Regression method was used for the computation of dimension scores. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed to find out the differences and similarities between the editorials from three phases and British press editorials. The dimension score analysis shows that, through the 20th century, Pakistani newspaper editorials became less informational, nonnarrative, explicit and overt and more impersonal. Furthermore, Phase 3 of Pakistani press editorials has been found the closest to that of Britain press editorials in producing informational, non-narrative and explicit discourse. In phase 1 and 2, Pakistani press editorials came closer to those of the British in producing abstract discourse and overt expression of persuasion respectively. The findings will contribute to the area of research concerning English language teaching and learning for specific purposes.