Gender Representation in Pakistani and British English Fiction: A Corpus Based Study

Abstract

The present study aims at the comparative stylistic analysis of gender presentation in terms of status and attitude in Pakistani and British English Fiction. The data are based on the instances of ‘he is’ and ‘she is’ in relation to the complements following them. The methodology adopted for the research is corpus based and deals with the data both qualitatively and quantitatively, however, with a major inclination towards qualitative analysis. The instances of ‘He is’ and ‘She is’ along with the  concordance words are derived from PEF and BEF corpora consisted of one million words for each through Antconc 3.2.2. The data are further manually analyzed in MS Excel and then categorized in relation to Status and attitude linked with ‘he’ and ‘she’ in both PEF and BEF. It is found that the gender representation is quite typical of the culture it relates to. The presentation of ‘he is’ and ‘she is’ in BEF is of positive and balanced nature where as that of in PEF is based on the superiority and inferiority of men and women respectively. The research is a contribution in the better understanding and interpretation of Pakistani English fiction and British English fiction.