Muhammad Afzaal
Biographic Data
| ID | 1076949 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Muhammad Afzaal |
| GIVEN NAMES | Muhammad |
| FAMILY NAME | Afzaal |
| SIGNATURE | AFZAAL M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Shanghai International Studies University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4649-781X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Discourse dependency distance minimization in agricultural academic abstracts: Evidence from the AgriDTB Corpus
This study investigates how second language (L2) writers organize discourse in academic texts to facilitate cognitive efficiency from the perspective of Dependency Distance Minimization (DDM). While previous studies have widely focused on syntactic-level structures, less is known about how writers manage the organization of clauses and propositions at the discourse level, particularly in the context of scientific writing. The study uses a self-bu…
Jian Feng’s translation of Emily Dickinson’s poetry: A conceptual study of creative treason in translation
The term ‘creative treason’ supports the very phenomenon of re-creation among translators in translation studies (TS). Whereas traditional theorists advocate the invisible role of translators when translating the source text, the theory of creative treason puts forward the idea that translation is a creative work and provides a new shape and attitude to the source text. This phenomenon is evident in the translated works of Jiang Feng. Therefore, …
The singular “national citizen” in English language textbooks in Pakistan: A multimodal critical discourse approach
Textbooks have been widely studied as ideological apparatuses that shape and are shaped by social orders. In the present paper we consider the specific nature of this process in Pakistan, in regard to English Language textbooks produced as part of the National Curriculum (SNC) beginning in 2020 under the slogan "one nation, one curriculum" to end the educational disparity in the country. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, we analyze a …
Reassessing China’s image in the China–Pakistan economic corridor discourse: A critical discourse analysis of Pakistani mainstream media reports
This study reassesses the representation of China in the context of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) within Pakistan’s mainstream media discourse based on a 5.1-million-word corpus of English-language news reports from LexisNexis. We employed a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach, augmented by Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques such as keyword analysis, collocation examination, and BERT-based sentiment ana…
Discourse strategies in news media: A corpus-based comparison of Chinese and US conflict reporting
This article explores the discourse construction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as represented within Chinese and US mainstream media. The study uses a corpus-based discourse-historical approach to compare the nomination and predicative strategies employed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict discourse. In doing so, we used a self-built corpus of Chinese media reports on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a corpus of US media reports. The f…
Exploring the grammatical complexity of L2 on non-English major learners’ writing: Taking engineering students as a case study
Over the past 10 years, the subject of grammatical complexity has attracted significant global interests. The present study employs the Register-Functional approach, shedding light on grammatical variations in the written mediums. Leveraging three corpora (i.e., the British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE), CEE corpus, and the Arab corpus), this study compares the writing assessment of native and L2 English students throughout their univers…
ChatGPT and intrinsic motivation in higher education: A TAM-based study
Highly evolved and capable, ChatGPT is an intelligent chatbot with great implications for fostering active student learning due to its capacity to respond quickly to academic queries as well as to engage in dynamic interactions with the learner. In the present research which was conducted within the Saudi university context, we studied how intrinsic motivation and factors related to TAM (technology acceptance model) influenced undergraduate stude…
A corpus-based analysis of stance markers in upper and lower proficiency level argumentative essays by Saudi learners
Strategic use of stance-taking devices in English language academic texts is a key indicator of the proficiency of any academic writer. While this is true of first language (L1) and second language (L2, ESL or EFL) writers alike, developing the ability to express authorial stance is far more challenging for the non-native writers who may lack the L1 cultural exposure to understand and express stance accurately in L2 writing. The present corpus-ba…
‘Yet his silence said volumes’: A pragmatic analysis of conversational silence in rapport management
Silences are crucial in interpersonal communication, serving as essential components of interpersonal relationships. The current study utilizes naturally occurring linguistic data and draws upon Spencer-Oatey’s Rapport Management Theory to examine the pragmatic functions of conversational silence in the context of rapport management. The findings reveal that within the framework of rapport orientation, silence plays a pivotal role and can be cate…
Redefining diplomatic discourse on the Belt and Road Initiative: A corpus-based sentiment analysis
This study examines the sentiments embedded in China's diplomatic discourse on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). It aims to explore how underlying emotions are constructed through language and their role in representing these projects. The corpus for this study consists of press releases from the official website of the Chinese government, spanning from 2013 to 2023. The findings reveal that China…
Revealing the ideology underpinning the European Union notion of resilient societies: A multimodal CDA approach
In recent years, the concept of resilience has emerged as a flagship ideal in European Union policy discourse, especially in the context of environmental and social sustainability. Drawing on Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), this article examines how resilience is constructed in the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) of EU member states (2021, 2023). We argue that resilience appears as highly positive term, yet has shift…
A corpus-based comparison of linguistic markers of stance and genre in the academic writing of novice and advanced engineering learners
Stance-taking in academic writing plays a crucial role in enabling tertiary academic writers to express their positions about their topics and other voices. Based on a corpus linguistic analysis of academic reports by civil and environmental engineering (CEE) undergraduate students and student papers in the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP), this article investigates the use of stance markers in the genres of persuasive and a…
Analyzing modality-mediated ideology in translated Chinese political discourses: An ideological square model approach
This study investigates the correlation between textual ideology and the English translations of political discourse. It focuses on how the translation shifts of modality relate to the socio-political and socio-cultural context of Chinese political discourse using the modality system of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as the theoretical framework. Three main types of translation shifts between should and will , and their corresponding items…
Investigating discourse markers “you know” and “I mean” in mediatized English political interviews: A corpus-based comparative study
This study employs a corpus-based approach to examine and compare the use of two discourse markers (DMs), “you know” and “I mean”, within the context of two mediatised English political interviews. The analysis encompasses frequencies, functions, co-occurrences, and positional distributions of these DMs. The study utilizes specialized corpora from two political interview programs: CGTN’s The Point with Liu Xin and BBC’s HARDtalk. The frequency an…
The translation teaching platform based on multilingual corpora of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China: Design, resources and applications
Over the last two decades, the domain of corpus-based translation studies has evolved into a significant paradigm, instrumental in probing a diverse array of scholarly inquiries. This article demonstrates the various uses of corpus analysis techniques that have gained popularity in translation studies, and it presents a new multilingual corpus. This corpus showcases the evolving nature of the field as it expands to accommodate new conceptual fram…
A comprehensive bibliometric analysis of speech acts in international journals (2013–2023)
This study presents a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of speech acts within international scholarly periodicals spanning over a period of 11 years. Employing a quantitative approach, the study utilizes CiteSpace, a powerful bibliometric tool, to discern and examine emerging patterns, novel trends, and the pivotal themes inherent to the realm of speech acts as portrayed in international journals. The results shed light on the nuanced variation…
Unlocking the Mysteries of Academic Writing: A Corpus-based Analysis of Lexical Bundles in L2 English for Engineering Students
This study examines the use of lexical bundles in reports produced by university-level L2 English writers in civil and environmental engineering (CEE). The corpus consists of 119 reports, and the study compares the use of different types of lexical bundles (3-word, 4-word, and 5-word) in high-scoring and low-scoring papers. The results show that high-scoring papers use a wider range of lexical bundles, and that the use of lexical bundles varies b…
Syntactic complexity in legal translated texts and the use of plain English: A corpus-based study
This study compared the linguistic difficulty of legal translated texts with the syntactic complexity of native English legal writings in order to demonstrate the statistically significant differences between the two big datasets. The study applies features of the syntactic complexity of sentences within legal text translations that translated texts are less complicated than their original counterparts. It provides an example of how easy plain En…
Syntactic complexity in translated eHealth discourse of Covid-19: A comparable parallel corpus approach
In the pandemic era, the efficient management of COVID-19 by public health authorities is dependent upon the effective dissemination of health-related information. Due to the global nature of COVID-19, translations of healthcare information from the source language to the languages of target users are common. The current study discusses the findings from a comparative corpus analysis of a self-built corpus based on the translated version of eHeal…
New Directions in Second Language Pragmatics (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs). Félix‐BrasdeferC. J., and ShivelyR.(2021). De Gruyter Mouton
Representations of Naya Pakistan: A corpus-based study of Pakistani media discourses
The study investigates how Pakistani media discourses represented the populist political rhetoric of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) between 2016 and 2018. Applying the theoretical lens of corpus-based critical discourse analysis to a specially constructed corpus, the study examines how PTI's populist political rhetoric was co-opted by the media to garner public support for it prior to the 2018 elections and then to criticize its performance foll…
Comrades or contenders: A corpus-based study of China's Belt and Road in US diplomatic discourse
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has received both praise and criticism within global settings. American stance, however, has been interesting sounding diplomatically more intricate. BRI’s opponents view it being hampered by impediments rather than facilitated with opportunities, while its advocates see opportunities instead of challenges because of its being in global limelight. While all parties have valid justifications for their express…
Critical Perspectives on Digitization of Translation: Challenges and Opportunities
Automated and Human Interaction in Written Discourse: A Contrastive Parallel Corpus-based Investigation of Metadiscourse Features in Machine-Human Translations
The rise of the internet has generated a need for fast online translations, which human translators cannot meet. Statistical tools such as Google and Baidu Translate provide automatic translation from one written language to another. This study reports the descriptive comparison of the machine-translation (MT) with human translation (HT), considering the metadiscoursal interactional features. The study uses a parallel corpus consisting of 79 text…
Metadiscourse in Chinese and American graduate dissertation introductions
The current study aims to look at differences in the use of metadiscourse in the introductory sections of English and Chinese university students. The corpus of the study comprises 20 “introductions” of university students’ MA theses. This study hinges on Hyland’s model of Metadiscourse (interactive and interactional resources) for its methodological framework and aims at analyzing academic writing of native academic and non-native writers. The f…
Comrades or contenders: A corpus-based study of China's Belt and Road in US diplomatic discourse
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has received both praise and criticism within global settings. American stance, however, has been interesting sounding diplomatically more intricate. BRI’s opponents view it being hampered by impediments rather than facilitated with opportunities, while its advocates see opportunities instead of challenges because of its being in global limelight. While all parties have valid justifications for their express…
Examining Pakistani news media discourses about China–Pakistan Economic Corridor: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis
The paper examines the construction of China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) through corpus-based critical discourse analysis of news in the Pakistani press. Overall, Pakistani newspapers show China as a slogan of “brotherhood” and a stereotype of China’s relationship as an “ironic bond” between China and Pakistan. The analysis reveals that a bulk of friendly and positive discourses about China have been constructed in the Pakistani media repor…
A Comparative Study of Cultural Values in Chinese and American Parenting Reflected in The Joy Luck Club
Education plays a pivotal role in a country’s progress and rejuvenation. As the most basic and vital stage in education, parenting exerts an invaluable role in supporting the progress of children. Under the influence of production mode, geographical environment, national policy and other factors, education in different countries takes on a unique and distinguishable character in correspondence with its cultural and geographical contexts. China an…
Thematic Parallels in Shakespeare and the 19th Century Urdu Poetry: A Comparative Study
This paper highlights that although Urdu poetry in the 19th century and English in Shakespeare's time is the embodiment of two different cultural, social, religious, and environmental factors, in their basic philosophies, both shared much that seems to be brought from a similar realm of thought. In this paper, the authors focus only on the thematic comparison of the key ideas, concentrating on topics and themes familiar in that time like life and…
Metadiscourse in Chinese and American graduate dissertation introductions
The current study aims to look at differences in the use of metadiscourse in the introductory sections of English and Chinese university students. The corpus of the study comprises 20 “introductions” of university students’ MA theses. This study hinges on Hyland’s model of Metadiscourse (interactive and interactional resources) for its methodological framework and aims at analyzing academic writing of native academic and non-native writers. The f…
New Directions in Second Language Pragmatics (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs). Félix‐BrasdeferC. J., and ShivelyR.(2021). De Gruyter Mouton
Representations of Naya Pakistan: A corpus-based study of Pakistani media discourses
The study investigates how Pakistani media discourses represented the populist political rhetoric of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) between 2016 and 2018. Applying the theoretical lens of corpus-based critical discourse analysis to a specially constructed corpus, the study examines how PTI's populist political rhetoric was co-opted by the media to garner public support for it prior to the 2018 elections and then to criticize its performance foll…
Comrades or contenders: A corpus-based study of China's Belt and Road in US diplomatic discourse
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has received both praise and criticism within global settings. American stance, however, has been interesting sounding diplomatically more intricate. BRI’s opponents view it being hampered by impediments rather than facilitated with opportunities, while its advocates see opportunities instead of challenges because of its being in global limelight. While all parties have valid justifications for their express…
Critical Perspectives on Digitization of Translation: Challenges and Opportunities
Automated and Human Interaction in Written Discourse: A Contrastive Parallel Corpus-based Investigation of Metadiscourse Features in Machine-Human Translations
The rise of the internet has generated a need for fast online translations, which human translators cannot meet. Statistical tools such as Google and Baidu Translate provide automatic translation from one written language to another. This study reports the descriptive comparison of the machine-translation (MT) with human translation (HT), considering the metadiscoursal interactional features. The study uses a parallel corpus consisting of 79 text…
Syntactic complexity in legal translated texts and the use of plain English: A corpus-based study
This study compared the linguistic difficulty of legal translated texts with the syntactic complexity of native English legal writings in order to demonstrate the statistically significant differences between the two big datasets. The study applies features of the syntactic complexity of sentences within legal text translations that translated texts are less complicated than their original counterparts. It provides an example of how easy plain En…
Syntactic complexity in translated eHealth discourse of Covid-19: A comparable parallel corpus approach
In the pandemic era, the efficient management of COVID-19 by public health authorities is dependent upon the effective dissemination of health-related information. Due to the global nature of COVID-19, translations of healthcare information from the source language to the languages of target users are common. The current study discusses the findings from a comparative corpus analysis of a self-built corpus based on the translated version of eHeal…
A corpus-based comparison of linguistic markers of stance and genre in the academic writing of novice and advanced engineering learners
Stance-taking in academic writing plays a crucial role in enabling tertiary academic writers to express their positions about their topics and other voices. Based on a corpus linguistic analysis of academic reports by civil and environmental engineering (CEE) undergraduate students and student papers in the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP), this article investigates the use of stance markers in the genres of persuasive and a…
Analyzing modality-mediated ideology in translated Chinese political discourses: An ideological square model approach
This study investigates the correlation between textual ideology and the English translations of political discourse. It focuses on how the translation shifts of modality relate to the socio-political and socio-cultural context of Chinese political discourse using the modality system of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as the theoretical framework. Three main types of translation shifts between should and will , and their corresponding items…
Investigating discourse markers “you know” and “I mean” in mediatized English political interviews: A corpus-based comparative study
This study employs a corpus-based approach to examine and compare the use of two discourse markers (DMs), “you know” and “I mean”, within the context of two mediatised English political interviews. The analysis encompasses frequencies, functions, co-occurrences, and positional distributions of these DMs. The study utilizes specialized corpora from two political interview programs: CGTN’s The Point with Liu Xin and BBC’s HARDtalk. The frequency an…
The translation teaching platform based on multilingual corpora of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China: Design, resources and applications
Over the last two decades, the domain of corpus-based translation studies has evolved into a significant paradigm, instrumental in probing a diverse array of scholarly inquiries. This article demonstrates the various uses of corpus analysis techniques that have gained popularity in translation studies, and it presents a new multilingual corpus. This corpus showcases the evolving nature of the field as it expands to accommodate new conceptual fram…
A comprehensive bibliometric analysis of speech acts in international journals (2013–2023)
This study presents a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of speech acts within international scholarly periodicals spanning over a period of 11 years. Employing a quantitative approach, the study utilizes CiteSpace, a powerful bibliometric tool, to discern and examine emerging patterns, novel trends, and the pivotal themes inherent to the realm of speech acts as portrayed in international journals. The results shed light on the nuanced variation…
Unlocking the Mysteries of Academic Writing: A Corpus-based Analysis of Lexical Bundles in L2 English for Engineering Students
This study examines the use of lexical bundles in reports produced by university-level L2 English writers in civil and environmental engineering (CEE). The corpus consists of 119 reports, and the study compares the use of different types of lexical bundles (3-word, 4-word, and 5-word) in high-scoring and low-scoring papers. The results show that high-scoring papers use a wider range of lexical bundles, and that the use of lexical bundles varies b…
Exploring the grammatical complexity of L2 on non-English major learners’ writing: Taking engineering students as a case study
Over the past 10 years, the subject of grammatical complexity has attracted significant global interests. The present study employs the Register-Functional approach, shedding light on grammatical variations in the written mediums. Leveraging three corpora (i.e., the British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE), CEE corpus, and the Arab corpus), this study compares the writing assessment of native and L2 English students throughout their univers…
ChatGPT and intrinsic motivation in higher education: A TAM-based study
Highly evolved and capable, ChatGPT is an intelligent chatbot with great implications for fostering active student learning due to its capacity to respond quickly to academic queries as well as to engage in dynamic interactions with the learner. In the present research which was conducted within the Saudi university context, we studied how intrinsic motivation and factors related to TAM (technology acceptance model) influenced undergraduate stude…
A corpus-based analysis of stance markers in upper and lower proficiency level argumentative essays by Saudi learners
Strategic use of stance-taking devices in English language academic texts is a key indicator of the proficiency of any academic writer. While this is true of first language (L1) and second language (L2, ESL or EFL) writers alike, developing the ability to express authorial stance is far more challenging for the non-native writers who may lack the L1 cultural exposure to understand and express stance accurately in L2 writing. The present corpus-ba…
‘Yet his silence said volumes’: A pragmatic analysis of conversational silence in rapport management
Silences are crucial in interpersonal communication, serving as essential components of interpersonal relationships. The current study utilizes naturally occurring linguistic data and draws upon Spencer-Oatey’s Rapport Management Theory to examine the pragmatic functions of conversational silence in the context of rapport management. The findings reveal that within the framework of rapport orientation, silence plays a pivotal role and can be cate…
Redefining diplomatic discourse on the Belt and Road Initiative: A corpus-based sentiment analysis
This study examines the sentiments embedded in China's diplomatic discourse on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). It aims to explore how underlying emotions are constructed through language and their role in representing these projects. The corpus for this study consists of press releases from the official website of the Chinese government, spanning from 2013 to 2023. The findings reveal that China…
Revealing the ideology underpinning the European Union notion of resilient societies: A multimodal CDA approach
In recent years, the concept of resilience has emerged as a flagship ideal in European Union policy discourse, especially in the context of environmental and social sustainability. Drawing on Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), this article examines how resilience is constructed in the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) of EU member states (2021, 2023). We argue that resilience appears as highly positive term, yet has shift…
Discourse dependency distance minimization in agricultural academic abstracts: Evidence from the AgriDTB Corpus
This study investigates how second language (L2) writers organize discourse in academic texts to facilitate cognitive efficiency from the perspective of Dependency Distance Minimization (DDM). While previous studies have widely focused on syntactic-level structures, less is known about how writers manage the organization of clauses and propositions at the discourse level, particularly in the context of scientific writing. The study uses a self-bu…
Jian Feng’s translation of Emily Dickinson’s poetry: A conceptual study of creative treason in translation
The term ‘creative treason’ supports the very phenomenon of re-creation among translators in translation studies (TS). Whereas traditional theorists advocate the invisible role of translators when translating the source text, the theory of creative treason puts forward the idea that translation is a creative work and provides a new shape and attitude to the source text. This phenomenon is evident in the translated works of Jiang Feng. Therefore, …
Linguistics (15 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (11 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Artificial Intelligence (6 works) · Discourse analysis (6 works) · Ideology (6 works)