Lexical Stress and Foot Patterns of Pakistani English

Foot Patterns of Pakistani English

Abstract

Pakistani English PE, a nativized
variety of English, has a different
lexical stress and foot pattern to that of
any native variety of English. This
difference in the varieties often results
in comprehension failure or leads to
awkward situations. The present study
focuses on describing the stress of
different syntactic categories of PE to
illustrate its foot patterns. The data was
collected from the English news
broadcasted from Radio Pakistan
Islamabad for Pakistani English
variety. The results show that PE is
significantly different from native
English varieties such as British
Standard English BSE, in respect to
placing primary and secondary level
stress on different syllables in a
multisyllabic word. For instance,
unlike native English varieties, where
lexical stress on a penultimate syllable
is more common in case of nouns and
adjectives, Pakistani English prefers to
place the stress on the ultimate syllable
irrespective of which syntactic
category is chosen. Furthermore,
differences are also noticed in foot
patterns; as foot pattern of PE is
‗Iambic‘ unlike BSE which shows
‗trochaic‘ foot pattern.