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This paper focuses on developing nominal synsets for the Saraiki language (SL), a lesser-studied language spoken in Pakistan. Nominal synsets are groups of nouns that share semantic characteristics and are crucial for natural language processing tasks such as information retrieval, machine translation, and text classification. The research aims to create Saraiki Nominal Synsets (SNS) using the Gurumukhi Punjabi WordNet. The study employs a hybrid approach, combining merge and expansion techniques for analysis and gathers data from PDF textbooks, online sources, and the Saraiki Wikimedia incubator. The collected data is limited to texts published between 2000 and 2019, and manually tagged using Antconc 3.4.4.0 wordlist due to the unavailability of a tagger for the Saraiki Language. The study builds a 2.2 million Saraiki word corpus and a list of 750 nouns, then categorizes and semantically organizes the Saraiki Nominal Synsets based on the list of Saraiki nouns. To identify and classify nouns in SL based on their semantic properties, a corpus-based approach is utilized, and nominal synsets are constructed using a combination of manual and automatic methods. Evaluating the quality of the synsets involves comparing them to existing lexical resources and conducting a semantic similarity analysis. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in capturing semantic relations among nouns in SL and producing synsets useful for various NLP applications. Overall, this study contributes to the development of linguistic resources for lesser-studied languages and provides valuable support for researchers and developers working on natural language processing tasks involving SL.

 Social relations of power are established and negotiated through discourse and joke telling is one strategy among many to do so. The present study is an attempt to examine the representation of women in jokes, circulated on Pakistani social media, by addressing four themes: representation of women in general, women exercising skills/intellect, women as life partners and representation of teenage girls/young women. The study employs the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) by Attardo & Raskin (1991) as a theoretical framework. From different social media sources like Facebook and Whatsapp, twenty jokes pertaining to women have been selected randomly and analysed on the basis of the GTVH's six knowledge resources. The study reflects the realization that women are represented as talkative and ignorant beings, devoid of intellect; women as life partners are shown to be domineering and intimidating figures, and the representation of teenage girls/young women reinforces stereotypes circulated by patriarchy discourse. The significance of this work lies in the assumption that systematically analysing jokes about women may help in exposing casual sexism and empower women by provoking them to question instead of internalizing the stereotypes circulated through jokes.

Pakistani English as an indigenous variety exhibits variation at different levels of language. Previous quantitative studies on Pakistani English have identified its distinct characteristics on the basis of the occurrence of individual linguistic items and have played a pioneering role in the recognition of Pakistani English as an independent variety. However, these studies are limited in their scope as they depend on individual linguistic features and unrepresentative data. Biber (1988) developed multidimensional (MD) approach for register variation studies based on the co-occurrence of lexio-grammatical features. Biber (1988) disregarded the reliability of individual linguistic features for being subjective and misleading in exploring variation among registers and emphasized the importance of co-occurrence of linguistic features to distinguish among registers. The idea of co-occurrence structures the basis of multidimensional approach which proves to be the most suitable quantitative and comparative approach for register variation studies. The present research as one of the pioneer studies on register variation aims to explore Pakistani academic writing register through multidimensional analysis. A special purpose corpus of 8.385000 million words of Pakistani academic writing has been constructed for the present research. The corpus consists of 235 research dissertations of MPhil and PhD graduates and is further divided into categories of research sections. To explore the distinct identity of Pakistani academic writing as a register, the current research aims to explore linguistic variation among research sections on five textual dimensions of Biber's 1988 study. The findings of the study reveal Pakistani academic writing as highly informational, non-narrative, exceedingly explicit, non-persuasive and impersonal in style.

The present study examines anxiety in English undergraduate classes with regard to the type of situations that provoke anxiety during different stages of the learning process and the relationship of anxiety with learners’ achievement. Participants of the study include 149 undergraduates enrolled in second and sixth semester of different departments of University of Sargodha who are learning English as a foreign language. The questionnaire used in this study is the abbreviated form of Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS). An inventory is also used to determine different situations that provoke anxiety. Finally, students’ GPA in English classes is taken to find its relationship with language anxiety. The results show that language anxiety and achievement are negatively related to each other. It is also found that female students are lessanxious in learning English as a foreign language than male students. ‘Speaking in front of others’ is rated as the biggest cause of anxiety followed by ‘worries about grammatical mistakes’, ‘pronunciation’ and ‘being unable to talk spontaneously’. It is suggested that the classroom environment should be encouraging and motivating. Moreover, teachers need to deal with anxiety-provoking situations carefully.