Exploring Linguistic Variation across Historical Speeches of Pakistani Politicians through Multidimensional Analysis

Abstract

Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA) offers a comprehensive approach to delineating register variation patterns, identifying underlying linguistic parameters expressed as "dimensions." Political speeches (PS), recognized as distinct registers, are the focus of this study. The objective is to examine situational factors in Pakistani writing, leveraging Biber's (1988) framework that delineates variations in political speeches. The research investigates linguistic variations in corpora derived from Pakistani political speeches, utilizing a multidimensional approach that compares frequencies of linguistic features within promotional varieties, as outlined by Biber (1988). The corpus consists of 30 political speeches from prominent leaders in Pakistani history, collected from online resources and organized methodically. A purely quantitative paradigm is employed to analyze two significant dimensions: "Involved vs. Informational Production" and "Overt Expression of Persuasion." The Multidimensional Analysis Tagger (MAT) in corpus technique is applied to examine the co-occurrence of linguistic and grammatical features within political speeches, with data tagging performed using the Biber tagger. The findings reveal that in Dimension 1 (D1), the nature of political speech is informational and non-argumentative. Specifically, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's speech (ZABS) is characterized as more informative and non-persuasive, exhibiting the lowest co-occurrence of linguistic features compared to Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s speech (QAMS) and Famous Historical Speeches (FHS). While limited, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of linguistic variation constructions across different speeches. The insights gained are significant for academic writers, syllabus designers, discourse analysts, and researchers focusing on political themes.