Narrative versus Non-Narrative Concerns: Multidimensional analysis of Short Stories for Children and Adults Published in Pakistani English Magazines

Author(s) : Maha Latif, Dr. Sajid Ali & Dr. Aleem Shakir

Abstract:

Abstract
The present study explores the stylistic linguistic differences in short stories, written for children and adults, published in Pakistani English magazines on the second dimension of Biber’s (1988) study. The second textual dimension deals with narrative and non-narrative linguistic features showing the narrativeness in fictional texts. The purpose of this study is to explore the different linguistic choices made by the short story writers writing stories for children and adults. It is the norm that the data of short stories published for children is shorter than the stories published for adults and due to the space availability certain linguistic choices may vary for both short stories writers. Furthermore, the study also identifies the stylistic linguistic variability among male and female short story writers. A corpus-based methodology has been used by applying MAT (Multidimensional Analysis Tagger) which is a replica of Biber’s (1988) tagger generally applied for studies on text types and genre variation. The corpus consists of 300 short stories, 150 each for children and adults, published in Pakistani English magazines during 2014-2017. The findings of the study reveal that short stories written for children are more narrative than that of adults showing high narrative discourse. Comparison of male and female short story writers show that male short story writers use high frequency of narrative features than female writers.
Keywords: Short stories for children and adults, linguistic variation, Popular Pakistani English magazines, Multidimensional Analysis