Writing requires a suitable and strategic use of language with communicative potential and structural correctness. The use of coherence and cohesion helps create communicative potential and structural correctness in texts. This study aims to investigate the use of cohesive items in the abstracts of Pakistani research articles and thereby determine what type of cohesive items are frequently used by writers. In addition, the study aims to know what functions the said writers achieve through the most frequently used cohesive items. For this purpose, 50 abstracts were retrieved from two famous Pakistani research journals (25 articles per journal), which were developed into a corpus for the study and analysed through AntConc. 3.4.4.0. The results revealed that Pakistani research writers used reference items the most frequently to achieve “directive” as well as “referential” functions. On the basis of these findings, the study concluded that Pakistani research article writers organised information in abstracts using reference items the most frequently and they were mainly concerned with directive as well as referential functions of meaning. The results also showed that the said writers organised texts on a syntactic level only, which implied that they should organise texts on a semantic level also. This would be possible with the use of repetition devices.

Background: Writing means communication through words whereas academic writing means making careful use of words to communicate ideas to a range of readers and audiences. Therefore, academic writing reflects specificities related to audience, context/discipline and purpose of the use. These specificities result in ample differences in terms of language use. Purpose: This study investigates disciplinary variation in the use of different syntactic (i.e., clausal, intermediate and phrasal) features in academic writing produced by the Pakistani advanced writers of English as an L2 specializing in different disciplines of arts and humanities, life sciences, physical sciences and social sciences. Method: For the said purpose, the corpus has been developed from dissertation texts produced by the Pakistani doctoral candidates from 16 academic disciplines of four disciplinary divisions. The analysis has been performed using AntConc Software after tagging with Multidimensional Analysis, and TagAnt Taggers. Results: The results reveal mixed findings. On the one hand, the results show variation in the use of syntactic features that is observed to be marked by the difference in the frequency of the different types of the said features across disciplines. On the other hand, the results show a similarity in the use of syntactic features that has been evidenced by the finding that the most and least frequently used features are identical across disciplines. Conclusion: These results suggest both heterogeneity and homogeneity in the use of syntactic features by the Pakistani advanced L2 academic writers. The results of this study have implications for educators, policy makers, and syllabus designers to ensure discipline-specific instruction, and incorporation of the discipline-specific syntactic features into the academic curricula for supporting academic writing development skills in the students particularly at the advanced level of education.

This corpus-based research investigates features representing different stages of development in Pakistani academic writing (AW) to determine the stage of Pakistani AW in physical and social sciences. Corpus for this research comprises texts from 80 doctoral dissertations and is analyzed through AntConc after tagging with Multidimensional Analysis Tagger (MAT) and TagAnt. Results show Pakistani AW in both disciplines frequently comprising nouns as pre-modifiers that represent Stage-3. These are lower level features used by the writers developing towards higher levels. Therefore, Pakistani advanced level AW in physical and social sciences is positioned at Stage-3. This suggests that Pakistani writers in these disciplines are operating below the expected developmental level specifically Stage-5. These results are found to oppose the general hypothesis i.e. L2 (English as a second language) academic writers frequently use phrasal features at the advanced level. Consequently, Pakistani AW is concluded to be below the required level of language development.

In Asian Englishes, it is observed that the two front vowels /i:/ and /I/ are not distinguished as two different phonemes. The researchers have revealed that the two vowels are merged in local varieties of English (Hung, 2000; Deterding, 2007; Gonzalez & Alberca, 1978 as cited in Bautista & Gonzalez, 2006; Zuraidah, 2000 as cited in Bautista & Gonzalez, 2006). This study is conducted to observe whether the distinction between /i:/ and /I/ is maintained in Pakistani English. 40 subjects (20 male and 20 female) were recorded using minimal pairs in a career phrase. Praat was used for measuring formant values and durational properties of the two vowels. The conclusions were drawn that there was no merger of the two vowels in Pakistani English as was observed in other varieties of Asian Englishes.

This paper aims at discovering the nature and extent of deviation in the articulation of consonants in Pakistani English due to the impact of mother tongue. A detailed experiment has been carried out with the help of Praat to analyze the acoustic properties of /?/ and /ð/ sounds spoken by Pakistani speakers. The research reveals that Pakistani English has a distinct pronunciation pattern of /?/ and /ð/ sounds. This research is an attempt to provide a scientific justification to establish Pakistani English as an independent variety.

Background: This study investigates the relationship where common linguistic errors may act as constraints on the attainment of syntactic complexity and explores the resulting pedagogical implications in advanced writing. Objective: The exploration of error patterns has been conducted to analyse sentence structure and instructional strategies in the advanced writing teaching process. The main objective of the research is to find a connection between the common linguistic errors that might serve as barriers to syntactic complexity being achieved, and a discussion of consequent pedagogical implications in advanced writing. Method: The investigation employs a quantitative approach in which the essays of 100 undergraduate students are analysed, and the relationship between the different features of syntactic complexity is examined. The features of syntactic complexity in the research studied include the mean number of words before the verb (SYNLE), the average number of modifiers per noun phrase (SYNNP), and sentence-to-sentence similarity. In contrast, the types of linguistic errors analysed include noun errors, form errors, and punctuation mistakes. The syntactic complexity features are drawn from the Coh-Metrix software, which provides measures of text cohesion and coherence. Results: The study reveals a significant negative correlation between noun and form errors and syntactic complexity. These errors, in particular, lead the writers to simplify their sentence structures, resulting in shorter pre-verbal segments and a drop in cohesion and coherence. In contrast, other error types, such as lexis and punctuation errors, have very weak or no correlation with the features of syntactic complexity. Conclusion: Highlighting noun mistakes and grammar errors as writing instruction issues is one of the most significant findings these results point to. They also indicate that the inclusion of syntactic complexity metrics in automated writing systems may help provide very nuanced feedback, thus allowing the writers to work on their sentence sophistication and the coherence of their texts. Contribution: The study has a major impact on research in second language writing and syntactic analysis, as it empirically demonstrates that noun and form errors are associated with sentence complexity and textual cohesion. In addition, it has led to the drawing of practical insights for writing training and the creation of automated feedback tools aimed at refining syntax and improving coherence in advanced second language writing.