Beyond the Western Canon: A Multidimensional Analysis of Linguistic Variation and Narrative Text Types in Contemporary Pakistani English Novels

Abstract

Although Pakistani English fiction has gained international recognition and critical acclaim, previous research has largely relied on qualitative, thematic, and postcolonial approaches, with limited attention to empirical corpus-based stylistic analysis. This quantitative study addresses this gap by examining text types and linguistic variation in a specialized mini-corpus of three contemporary Pakistani novels: The Last White Man (2022) by Mohsin Hamid, No Honour (2021) by Awais Khan, and The Monsoon War (2023) by Bina Shah. The study employs Douglas Biber’s MD Analysis framework and the automated Multidimensional Analysis Tagger (MAT) to analyze 67 lexicogrammatical features across four situational dimensions. The findings reveal substantial syntactic variation across the selected novels, reflecting distinctive sub-genre characteristics. No Honour exhibited high frequencies of private verbs and past tense markers, classifying it as a highly involved narrative (+6.85 on Dimension 1). The Monsoon War demonstrated a strong preference for attributive adjectives and passive constructions, resulting in its classification as an informational/abstract narrative (+5.65 on Dimension 5). In contrast, The Last White Man showed a higher frequency of explicit relative clauses, characterizing it as an imaginative narrative. The analysis also indicates that these Pakistani English novels employ significantly more public verbs and interactive syntactic bundles than those reported in traditional Western reference corpora. Overall, the findings provide empirical evidence that contemporary Pakistani English fiction represents an independent literary register with distinctive linguistic characteristics rather than a derivative variety of English. These stylistic patterns illustrate how Pakistani writers adapt English to construct localized narrative voices that extend beyond conventional Western literary norms.