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Abstract

This study investigates the lexical patterns in Muhammad Hanif’s novels to explore how language shapes meaning, satire, and ideology. The research focused on four key categories: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs because they form the foundation of Hanif’s stylistic strategies. Guided by Leech and Short’s (2007) stylistic framework and interpreted through Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study asked how lexical choices reflect cultural, political, and social realities in his fiction.
A corpus of Hanif’s three novels was compiled and tagged by TagAnt software. This part-of-speech tagged file was compared with the British National Corpus by using AntConc to identify distinctive lexical features. The analysis showed that nouns such as General Zia, Alice Bhatti, white man, Mughals, Muslims, and caste-based terms like choorha act as cultural and ideological markers, exposing prejudice and critiquing authority. Verbs of violence, such as slash the throat, kill, and slap highlighted militarism and oppression, while cognitive verbs expressed psychological depth. Adjectives in Hanif’s novels are loaded with meaning: own and little emphasize vulnerability, while white, dead, red, and black highlight race, violence, and mortality. Others such as bloody, bad, and military sharpen his satire and critique of institutional power. The findings demonstrate that Hanif’s language is deliberate and politically charged, using lexical strategies to challenge social norms and power structures. Future research may extend this work by examining grammatical features and figures of speech or by comparing Hanif with other South Asian writers to broaden insights into postcolonial stylistics.