Logical Connectors in Newspapers: A Comparative Study of Pakistani And British Columns

The present study is an attempt to explore and compare the patterns and frequencies of usage of logical connectors in Pakistani and British English newspapers. Logical connectors are important tools that make the written and spoken discourse rationally more connected and cohesive. Non-native speakers of English often confuse spoken mode with written communication and certain expressions that are suitable for spoken are transformed and applied in written discourse. It results in a combination of such propositions that are semantically and logically less related to each other. Present study aims to study whether the same trend exist in the Pakistani English and British newspapers. Pakistani English and British newspapers columns were studied from June to July 2016. Antconc software has been used to compare and contrast the use of logical connectors in both corpora. The results of the present study revealed that there is a significant difference in the use of connectors in both corpora. Pakistani column writers use more logical connectors as compared to the British. This overuse of logical connectors suggests the influence of Urdu, Pakistani writers tend to use certain expressions that the native would simply avoid in columns writing.