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A Comparison of Conjunctive Cohesion between Pakistani and British English Newspapers’ Opinion Articles

Paper · 2024 · Maham Khalid and Humaira Irfan

Summary

This study asks whether Pakistani English, a norm-developing variety in Kachru's outer circle, differs from British English in how writers connect clauses with conjunctive adjuncts. The authors built two small corpora of newspaper opinion pieces from November 2023. One holds 28 articles from The Express Tribune (TET) and the other 25 from The Guardian (TG). They searched both for a fixed inventory of 80 conjunctions, organised with the Halliday and Matthiessen (2013) revision of the Halliday and Hasan (1976) cohesion model into three functional classes (elaboration, extension, enhancement) and nine subclasses. Frequencies were counted with AntConc 4.2.4. Extending conjunctions dominate in both varieties, and the Pakistani texts lean on them more heavily. The British texts use more elaborating and enhancing connectives. "And", "but" and "or" are the three most frequent items in both corpora, and Pakistani writers overuse "and". The two varieties diverge most on multi-word or complex connectives. The work contributes to describing Pakistani English norms through authentic written data.

Key points

  • Data: 28 TET opinion articles (Pakistani English) and 25 TG opinion articles (British English), all from November 2023, each set stored as a single text file.
  • Framework: Halliday's conjunction model as adapted by Halliday and Matthiessen (2013).
    • Elaborating: appositive, clarifying.
    • Extending: additive, adversative, varying.
    • Enhancing: matter, manner, spatio-temporal, causal-conditional.
  • Tool: frequency counts for 80 listed conjunctions obtained with Anthony's AntConc (version 4.2.4).
  • Result: Pakistani texts favour extending conjunctions. British texts show higher rates of elaborating and enhancing ones. The top three items in both are "and", "but" and "or", with notably heavy use of "and" on the Pakistani side.
  • The varieties look alike on simple connectives but differ in their choice of complex conjunctive items.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Mapping a closed list of connectives onto a small functional taxonomy (elaboration, extension, enhancement, then nine subtypes) gives an interpretable label for the relation between neighbouring clauses.
  • I2. The paper's inventory lists the same word, such as "yet", under more than one subtype (adversative and causal-conditional), which shows that surface counting cannot settle a connective's function.
  • I3. Comparing the frequency profiles of function categories across two varieties of English on the same genre and time window is a cheap, controlled way to detect dialectal style differences.
  • I4. The observation that one variety relies heavily on "and" while the other spreads meaning over richer connectives suggests that clause linking carries register and stylistic information.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): prag could use this taxonomy as a first-pass discourse-relation label between clause frames, so that "therefore" or "in other words" produce an explicit, explainable link type instead of nothing.
  • I2 (tree): the UD attachment of such words (cc versus advmod, and the clause each one modifies) could be used to choose the sense, turning the ambiguity into a parser-driven decision.
  • I3 (learn): evaluation sets could be stratified by variety (e.g., Pakistani vs British news prose), so that drops in parser or frame accuracy on outer-circle English show up rather than being averaged away.
  • I4 (back): the generator could choose between plain additive chaining and more specific elaborating or enhancing connectives to match a target register when realising a meaning graph as text.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPhilosophy · 284 worksLiterature and Literary Theory · 519 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Maham Khalid and Humaira Irfan. 2024. A Comparison of Conjunctive Cohesion between Pakistani and British English Newspapers’ Opinion Articles. University of Chitral Journal of Linguistics and Literature 8.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@article{khalid2024comparison,
  title = {{A Comparison of Conjunctive Cohesion between Pakistani and British English Newspapers’ Opinion Articles}},
  author = {Maham Khalid and Humaira Irfan},
  journal = {University of Chitral Journal of Linguistics and Literature 8},
  year = {2024},
  url = {https://jll.uoch.edu.pk/index.php/jll/article/view/267}
}

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