MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF NOUN PATTERNS IN SARAIKI: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY

Abstract

This descriptive study investigated and categorized the morphological patterns of noun formation in Saraiki, an under-researched language in the Indo-Aryan family spoken in Pakistan. To fulfil these goals, a vast corpus of two million words was created. The data that was not machine-readable was turned into editable documents using OCR. The text was evaluated using the AntConc 3.5.9.0 procedure, which entails extracting words that end in specified morphological patterns and analyzing them for their syntactic role as nouns. The productivity and frequency of the patterns were used to classify the results. The results demonstrated that patterns such asق, س, and غ were much more productive in creating nouns than other patterns.  These patterns were important in Saraiki's grammatical structure, and their production was higher in formal and academic settings. In contrast, patterns like ݨی exhibited reduced productivity, primarily functioning as adjectives or adverbs. This ے pattern advances our knowledge of Saraiki grammar and offers insightful information on the morphology of a language that has received little attention in linguistic research. According to this research, in addition to basic nouns, the Saraiki language also has derived nouns, a small number of compound nouns with unique regional vocabulary, and words borrowed from Urdu and English. The results also have applications in computational linguistics and the creation of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for Saraiki. Future studies should broaden the corpus and delve more into the grammatical functions of these noun-forming patterns.