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Thought and logic are the underlying foundations of language in use. One of the representations of language in use is poetry; a widely used literary genre throughout the world. The current study aims to identify instances of silence as a metaphorical expression in Akhtar’s (2017) Lahore, I Am Coming. The metaphorical expressions are mapped into source domain and target domain by deciphering the underlying meaning (theme) of the keyword in context (KWIC) silence. The qualitative and interpretive research design is used with Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory to develop the linguistic metaphor of silence at the conceptual level via thematic study. The findings of the study reveal that silence is significantly used as a metaphorical expression to express several key themes such as human relationships (love), colonialism and imperialism, and representation of females. The conceptual metaphors of silence are used to convey unified themes of loss, love, and language. Future researchers can conduct a linguistic analysis, specifically cognitive-linguistic analysis of Akhtar’s (2017) Lahore, “I Am Coming” to study the creative use of the figurative use of language.

From the beginning of the scholarly work on the women, most of the research have been carried out by opposite gender. Therefore, there have been limited work done to see how a woman portrays another woman in her writings. Moreover, there have been limited research conducted utilizing corpus tools for the analysis of gynocriticism. Thus, the present research aims to examine The Color Purple by Alice Walker by employing the corpus-based approach to investigate the representation of female character by the author in the novel. The positive or negative portrayal of women by the author in the novel was investigated through author’s usage of adjectives. Showalter's (2009) Theory of Gynocriticsim was used as a theoretical framework for the current research. Further, corpus-based methodology was employed to analyze how Alice Walker has portrayed the female character in her novel through the use of adjectives. An in-depth analysis has shown that Alice Walker has depicted woman as a helpless and sidelined being who can be turned as a resilient after suffering from frightful circumstances. The current research also opens new gates for the researchers to analyze the text from Gynocriticial perspective along with corpus techniques. Keywords: Adjectives; Corpus-based analysis; Gynocriticsim; The Color Purple; Woman

Hedges and boosters are very important in writing as these expressions indicate the writers‘ standpoint. Previous studies (Abbas & Shehzad, 2018; Zafar, 2018) show that a little work has been done in Pakistan on hedges and boosters; especially in newspaper opinion articles. The current study aims at investigating the most frequently occurring hedges and boosters in Pakistani newspaper opinion articles and to analyze writers‘ stance of using hedges and boosters in writing opinion articles. The data was collected from 5 Pakistani English newspapers; The Dawn, The Pakistan Observer, The Express Tribune, The Nation and The Daily Times. 50 opinion articles were randomly taken from these newspapers and comprises a corpus of 47927 words. The articles chosen were written by different authors and these were published in November, 2018. MetaPak(Abbas, Shehzad, & Ghalib, 2017)software was used to extract the hedges and boosters from the corpus. The frequencies of these hedges and boosters were represented through graphs. The researchers analyzed and discussed these hedges and boosters in order to analyze writers‘ standpoints. The software showed the total frequency of would, could and should to be 143 times, 60 times and 61 times respectively in the corpus. After the manual analysis of the collocations of these words, it was revealed that the occurrence of could and would as a hedge is 58 each and of should as a booster is also 58. The findings of the study showed that most frequently occurring hedge markers were would and could and the most frequently occurring booster was should. After the analysis of the data, it was found that the use of hedge marker by the writer showed his stance of being cautious and careful in his writings. The writers, in many cases, do not want to promise themselves to the statements; rather they are more uncertain in their words and opinions they make. This finding showed that the Pakistani writers‘ do not speak explicitly but keep themselves at a distance in projecting their stance. On the other hand, the findings concluded that in the use of boosters there is certainty in writers‘voice. It also showed that the writers‘ is voice seemed confident and assertive. The study reveals that the employment of boosters in writings is because the writer wants his readers to be convinced about their opinions and suggestions.

This study aims at researching the role of print media in creating a racial project through the development and perpetuation of ethnic stereotypes. For this purpose,American newspaper coverage of mass shootings occurring from year 2000 onwards are analysed, through corpus-based approach. The research focuses on a comparison between the discriminated reporting of white American shooters and the American shooters of different ethnic backgrounds by a close analysis of the lexical items, particularly adjectives. Thus, two corpora of 38,582 words are formulated based on sixteen mass shooting incidents. Among them eight incidents were carried out by white shooters and eight by non-white American shooters. The news articles are taken from the top American newspaper agencies such as The Guardian U.S Edition, The New York Times, New York Daily and The Washington Post.Critical Discourse Analysis approach presented by Fairclough(1992)and the concept of ―Other‖ put forth by Edward Said(1978)serve as a theoretical framework for the study whereas Corpus Linguistics along with CDA serve as the two methodological constructs. The data is analyzed using software tools such as Wordsmith Tools and LancsBox 32. The findings reveal that the ethnicity of a shooter such as Korean, Afghan, Bosnian, Saudi and Vietnamese determines the shape a discourse would take. However there is a deliberate omission of the race when the perpetrator is a white man. The findings further reveal the lexical items with negative connotations like ―terrorist‖, ―extremist‖ and ―radical‖ are mostly used with Muslim perpetrators or with perpetrators of immigrant status to some extent but never with white mass murderers. These white killers are justified or humanized by declaring mental health issues as the root of the problem. The analysis yields that the articles about the white American perpetrators are mostly constituted of objective facts i.e. about the objective details of the incidents and the lives of the shooters. On the other hand, the articles about shooters with different ethnic background focus on the subjective details about the lives of the killers. Similarly adjectives with negative connotations such as ̳crazy, mad and abusive‘ are never associated with white American shooters.

Book reviews have predominantly become one of the influential writings to reflect the general attitude/stance of a writer regarding a certain text. The ability of a writer to instigate a certain image of a text in the mind of the reader through a distinctive variety of linguistic expressions has become one of the crucial topics in the domain of academic discourse. Embedded in the theory of metadiscourse, this paper follows a corpus-based approach to linguistically analyse the metadiscursive nature of attitude markers in Pakistani English book reviews as postulated by Hyland (2004) in his generated list of interactional attitude markers. This paper analyses different linguistic categories as forms of attitude markers which book reviewers employ to project their stance. The present study not only focuses on the personal mention of authors through „I‟, but also explores other modes of attitude markers through which the authors have interpreted, explained, paraphrased, or presented their personal points of view (Hyland, 2004). The data of this paper comprises of fifty randomly selected English book reviews that were extracted from highly certified Pakistani English Newspapers that are, Dawn, The News and Express Tribune. Making this study corpus-based in nature, this paper also presents a raw frequency of attitude markers used within the texts. The result of the study shows that out of 100 book reviews which make 76000 words in total, a total number of 852 words are assigned to attitude markers ranging from personal mention to adverbs and adjectives which variedly reflect the defined role of authorial stance within texts. In a nutshell, book reviews have a high potential for expanding academic discourse as writers continue to use linguistic categories to project their perspectives regarding a certain phenomenon in texts.