CORPUS STYLISTICS AND KEYWORD ANALYSIS OF THEMATIC PATTERNS IN SELECTED PAKISTANI ENGLISH WOMEN WRITERS' FICTION: A LINGUISTIC-LITERARY INVESTIGATION

Abstract

This study investigates recurrent thematic patterns in fiction by Pakistani English women writers through corpus stylistics and keyword analysis. Grounded in the theoretical framework of Corpus Stylistics (Mahlberg, 2013; McIntyre & Walker, 2019) integrated with Baker's (2023) keyword-analysis model, the research examines how lexical choices construct themes of gender, identity, violence, and diaspora. The study addresses the scarcity of empirical, computer-assisted stylistic research on Pakistani women's Anglophone fiction, which has traditionally been approached through impressionistic literary criticism rather than quantifiable linguistic evidence. A purposive sample of three novels by three writers, Bapsi Sidhwa, Kamila Shamsie, and Uzma Aslam Khan, forms the study corpus (approx. 50,000  words), compared against a reference corpus of three novels by Pakistani male English writers (approx. 50,000 words). Data were collected by digitising and cleaning the sampled texts and analysed using AntConc (Anthony, 2024) to generate word frequency lists, keyness statistics, and concordance (KWIC) lines, followed by qualitative interpretation of keyword clusters. Findings indicate that the women writers' corpus foregrounds keywords clustering around embodiment, silence/voice, domestic space, and historical trauma, distinguishing it stylistically from the comparison corpus. The study contributes a replicable methodological model for corpus-assisted literary analysis of Pakistani Anglophone fiction and offers pedagogical and critical implications for gender-sensitive stylistic study.