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A list of 350 words that deviate in pronunciation from the standard English pronunciation of these words has been suggested in the present study. To highlight the deviant pronunciation of these words from the standard pronunciation, a wordlist based on observation has been suggested. Transcription of the words according to the British, American, and Pakistani phonetic variants has been given. The general phonological patterns of the pronunciation of these English words by Pakistani speakers as non-native learners of English have also been suggested. The deviation can be found in terms of the elongation of sounds, insertion or omission of schwa, pronunciation of diphthongs as monophthongs, stress patterns, and focus on spellings than sounds. The study not only highlights the unique phonological features of Pakistani English but also offers an opportunity for Pakistani teachers and learners to focus on these words while teaching or learning how to pronounce English words correctly. The study has implications for TESOL, EFL, SLA, and contrastive phonetics and phonology.

English as an international language has left its impact on all the languages being spoken in the world. This impact has led to a world-wide language variation on a large scale. This variation can be evidently observed in the form of code-mixing and code-switching. The study explores and analyzes the frequency of code-mixing in the TV ads broadcasted in Pakistan so as to determine the level of variation that took place in Urdu due to English. Seventy commercials that have been shown during the years 2011-2015 have randomly been selected and the frequency of English words has been checked. The results show that so far as the language of commercials is concerned, Urdu has clearly been influenced by English due to multiple reasons such as fashion, ease and technological advancements etc.

Images have the potential to both alienate and unite. Due to their ideological power, images can both create and clear misconceptions. To analyze the semiotic variation in the portrayal of women in contemporary art in relation to feminine identities and ideological representations, the study analyzes the choice of ideational signs in the contemporary Chinese and Pakistani paintings on the basis of the social semiotic approach of the grammar of visual design suggested by Kress and van Leeuwen. Considering diversity of themes and portrayal of women, 30 Pakistani and 30 Chinese paintings, painted by 17 Chinese and 17 Pakistani male and female painters were selected through an information-rich sampling technique. Results suggest that loneliness, waiting, leisure, and love for nature are the common themes related to Chinese and Pakistani women which the painters have creatively modeled. The images vary in the sense that Chinese women have been represented in constructive gender roles, such as working women, ballerinas, sports women, and hardworking farmers, etc., while Pakistani women have been represented in terms of resistance, oppression, victimhood, religiosity, and protection. The study has implications for gender studies, multimodal representations, and the way we comprehend, describe, and construct the interconnected yet fragmented fabric of our world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The provision of rule of law and justice contributes to the building of equitable, inclusive, and economically prosperous societies. However, mere legal protection of the rights of the people in developing societies remains insufficient to ensure due protections guaranteed by the law. This study examines the impact of a legal empowerment project in the two districts of rural Punjab in Pakistan through key informant interviews and focus group discussions. The findings show that the project leads to awareness and fulfilment of rights, financial empowerment, agency development, especially of women, and reduction of oppression, exploitation, and injustice. It plays a significant role in building inclusive and sustainable societies where accountable public services are available and accessible to all without discrimination. This study emphasizes how the state including public and private administrative bodies should instead of oppressing, exploiting, or ignoring the needy masses create opportunities for them and develop their set of capabilities. This multidimensional paralegal assistance model rooted in existing community-based structures and support is scalable and adaptable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study highlights the creative use of deviation as a stylistic device for presenting linguistic innovations in the novel Duty Free (originally published in 2011) written in English by a Pakistani writer Moni Mohsin. It has been explored how and to what extent the eight types of deviation, such as lexical, grammatical, semantic, phonological, graphological, dialectal, deviation of register, and deviation of historical period suggested by Geoffrey N. Leech have been employed by Moni Mohsin in her novel. By identifying how morphological, compound, and idiomatic neologisms have been created, words from native languages have been borrowed, and innovative similes, metaphors, and tautologies rooted in Pakistani culture have been employed, the study helps in understanding the extent to which novel uses of English language create unique stylistic effects, add to the richness and vitality of English, and cause variation simultaneously. Deviation of historical period and certain subcategories of phonological deviation have not been found. The study has implications for Pakistani English, lexicology, stylistic foregrounding, and creative writing in English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The technical and non-technical presentations made in English by the undergraduate engineering students at the University of Engineering and Technology (UET) Lahore include lab and survey report presentations, project presentations, mid-term or final term presentations in English. The goal of the study was to figure out the engineering students' reasons behind feeling anxious while giving presentations in English at UET Lahore. For this purpose, 518 undergraduate engineering students from UET, Lahore filled a questionnaire and responded to an open-ended question to determine the causes of anxiety. The data was coded and categorized using in vivo coding system. Findings indicate that the participants mainly experience anxiety due to poor proficiency in English, fear of judgment by the audience, lack of confidence, lack of exposure to speaking English and making presentations in English at school or college level, poor preparation or practice, and insufficient linguistic input. The study has implications for specific lingual assessments, English as a foreign language, and psycholinguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Art has the soft power to destabilize, subvert, and regulate certain behaviour patterns, identities, and choices. The study aims to explore and understand how men, women, society, and honor killings, in general, have semiotically been represented through visual signs in the paintings and what cultural themes and connotations regarding gender identities and honor killing be derived. The socio-semiotic approach of the grammar of visual design based on ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions suggested by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) has been applied to study the grammar of eight paintings with reference to gender roles, ideologies, and victimhood. Ideational signs including setting, actors, processes involved in the arrangement, relations between represented participants and their cultural connotations, as well as angle, shot, distance, colour schemes, and modality as interpersonal semiotic resources, and composition, salience, and placement as textual choices have been examined in detail. The analysis shows that women have been represented as marginalized and oppressed, while men as dominant and controlling. The study has implications for gender studies, communication studies, semiotics, honor killing, sociology, and gender-based violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What remains invisible in the discourse, contributes to perpetuating multilayered inequalities through discourse. Stereotypical representations, under-representations, hyper-representations, or misrepresentations regulate rape myths, and consequently, particular ways of seeing and behaving of those inside or outside the cultural boundaries. It has, therefore, been studied if and how rape victims and perpetrators have been visually represented and framed in the digital illustrations on rape in Pakistan. Discrepancies concerning identity construction of the rape victims and rapists as well as the depiction of multifarious socio-semiotic dimensions of rape have been analyzed. Thirty-five digital illustrations appearing in 32 blogs and news articles published on rape cases in Pakistan have been purposively selected and studied based on ideational metafunction suggested by Kress and van Leeuwen. Results reveal under-representation of rapists and perpetrators, law enforcement, survivors, and existing myths regarding revenge rape, child abuse, gang rape, marital rape, and gender-based victimhood. The study has implications for semiotics, rape studies, gender studies, and digital discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on formality in the literary and colloquial registers, the study compares the text of the novel Pride and Prejudice to the script of its film adaptation released in 2005. To find out the formality differences between the novel and its adaptation, 62 extracts from the novel have been compared with the same number of relevant extracts from the movie script. The analysis is informed by the concept of formality expounded by Heylighen and Dewaele, formal links and coherence markers suggested by Cook, elaborate and economy features proposed by Finegan and Biber, and the features of colloquial speech identified by Iqbal. Results show that formality in the novel has been brought by elaboration and well-formedness caused by using lexical and syntactic devices, such as attributive adjectives, prepositional phrases, parallelism, and sentence length and structure maintained through logical connectors and lexical diversity. Contrarily, features such as phrases, contractions, tag questions, clipping, passive constructions, topic-comment structures, and incomplete utterances are the colloquial markers of ease and informality in the script, thus making it appear as casual and flexibly structured speech. The study has implications for stylistics and pragmatics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Episodes of ideological concern related to honour norms and construction of social meanings depicted through paintings are pertinent in foregrounding the social realities of Pakistan. This paper analyzes the grammar of paintings from the perspective of gender roles assumed in the context of honour. The grammar of the visual design of five paintings painted by male and female Pakistani painters belonging to different areas of Pakistan have been qualitatively studied in the light of the social semiotic framework suggested by Kress and Leeuwen (2006). The results show that women are represented as helpless, outcast and oppressed beings; while men have been depicted, indirectly through signs, as oppressors. Paucity of research in this area and implications of the analysis for gender studies, anthropological linguistics, violence studies and visual literacy, make it a significant contribution to the existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polylactic acid (PLA) is a biodegradable thermoplastic polyester. In 2010, PLA became the second highest consumed bioplastic in the world due to its wide application. Conventionally, PLA is produced by direct condensation of lactic acid monomer and ring opening polymerization of lactide, resulting in lower molecular weight and lesser strength of polymer. Furthermore, conventional methods of PLA production require a catalyst which makes it inappropriate for biomedical applications. Newer method utilizes metabolic engineering of microorganism for direct production of PLA through fermentation which produces good quality and high molecular weight and yield as compared to conventional methods. PLA is used as decomposing packaging material, sheet casting, medical implants in the form of screw, plate, and rod pin, etc. The main focus of the review is to highlight the synthesis of PLA by various polymerization methods that mainly include metabolic engineering fermentation as well as salient biomedical applications of PLA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In data analysis, the first step for broad analysis is outlying items. Outlying items cause false results, biased parameter estimation and model misspecification. Some of the methods for detection of outlier are: Distance based method, Distribution based method, Density based method and Clustering based method. In this research, clustering based method is used for outlying items. The purpose of this study is to detect outlier in multivariate data by performing cluster analysis. The K means and Partitioning Around Medoid (PAM) methods were performed. After cluster the data outliers are detected by measuring distance. The comparison of the clustering techniques in outlier detection methods are analyzed. The secondary data was used for analysis. In this data set impact of zinc phosphide with three sub lethal doses (concentrations) on different body tissues of rat are used to find any anomalies. R software was used for data analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lipases are important hydrolytic enzymes that hydrolyze long chain triacylglycerol into diacylglycerol, monoacylglycerol, glycerol and fatty acids. Lipases are found in microorganisms, fungi, plants and animals. Commercially, useful extracellular lipases are isolated from different bacterial species, including Bacillus, Achromobacter, Alcaligenes, Arthrobacter, Pseudomonas, Staphylococcus and Chromobacterium species. Among the Pseudomonas species, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, P. cepacia and P. fluorescence are the major producers of lipases. Bacterial lipases have great industrial applications because of their stability, selectivity and broad substrate specificity. Due to their large scale application in industrial sectors, attention is given to isolate Pseudomonas lipases. In this review, purification strategies for lipases isolated from Pseudomonas species have been focussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study highlights the discursive representation of fear in the images used in news, articles, and blogs on Covid-19. Various dimensions of the impact of fear on tourism, trade, health, industry, and technology, etc. have been pinpointed by studying the ideational signs in relation to the proximization strategies used in the images. Ideational metafunction suggested by Kress and van Leeuwen(2006) has been applied to 80 images taken from 80 news articles or blogs to highlight the patterns of Covid-19 fear and its impact. Besides, Cap's(2017) understanding of spatio-temporal and axiological proximization strategies for the construction of fear in health discourse also inform the analysis. The results not only show how fear is linked to the display of human values and evils but also bring to light how various ideational choices of signs serve as rhetorical proximization strategies in the construal of disease as an imminent danger and apocalyptic hazard. The study has implications for multimodality, medical semiotics, sociology, and the 'discourse of fear'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]