New Englishes and Local Context: Exploring Strategies of Pragmatic Nativization in Pakistani English

Abstract

Pragmatics is an understanding of language and communicating ideas according to the situation. Pakistani speakers and writers adopt various strategies to interact with local listeners and readers. Discourse markers are analyzed as indicators of strategies for pragmatic nativization. This study is based on the data collected from Pakistani newspaper ‘The Dawn’ and the data is converted into three million words corpus (DNC). The findings are contrasted with the results from British National Corpus (BNC) which comprises of 100 million words corpus. Purposive sampling techniques have been adopted to get the data. The findings are presented in tabular form with a focus on a range of data in the two corpora. Speakers of Pakistani English use less discourse markers as compared to British speakers. Schneider’s dynamic model (2007) has been adopted as theoretical lens for this study with special focus on nativziation as Pakistani English is at the stage of nativization and Pakistani users use different pragmatic strategies for nativization of English.