WORLDS WITHIN WORDS: A CORPUS-BASED COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF CIRCUMSTANTIAL ELEMENTS IN NATIVE AND PAKISTANI ENGLISH SHORT STORIES

Abstract

This study employs a corpus-based analysis grounded in Halliday and Matthiessen's (2014) Systemic Functional Linguistics framework to investigate how circumstantial elements construct divergent experiential perspectives in Native English (NE) and Pakistani English (PE) short stories. Through manual UAM Corpus Tool annotation of Doris Lessing's "A Mild Attack of Locusts" and A. R. Khatoon's "The Crucifixion," the research quantifies and compares circumstantial patterns across spatial, temporal, manner, and logico-semantic categories. Findings reveal significantly higher circumstantial density in PE narratives (37.4% vs. NE's 35.6%), with marked disparities in remote time (PE 88.0% vs. NE 58.1%), absolute place (PE 78.7% vs. NE 70.5%), quality manner (PE 54.7% vs. NE 44.9%), and projection circumstances (PE 1.9% vs. NE 0.3%). These patterns demonstrate PE's preference for Culturally anchored world-building through spatial-temporal precision (e.g., "Lahore's Walled City," "during Partition"), Philosophical abstraction via manner augmentation (e.g., "grieving silently"), and Narrative hybridity using logico-semantic expansion (e.g., "as if the walls whispered histories").

The research signifies that PE writers leverage circumstances as semiotic scaffolds to construct layered, durational narratives reflecting Urdu storytelling traditions and postcolonial consciousness, whereas NE prioritises economical, action-driven progression. This grammatical asymmetry reveals how circumstantial choices encode cultural epistemologies PE's richness facilitates "narrative resistance against colonial linguistic austerity" , transforming syntax into a tool for identity negotiation. The study advances transitivity theory by demonstrating circumstances as grammatical sites of cultural translation, with implications for pedagogical approaches to postcolonial literatures and cross-cultural stylistics.