Lexical, Syntactic and Phonological Analysis of Omer Tarin's “A Love Story”

Abstract

This article presents a systematic stylistic analysis of the short story “A Love Story” written by Pakistani English writer Omer Salim Khan (pen name, Omer Tarin) from his 2011 collection From Hill and Plain: Short Stories. By employing Leech and Short's (2007) framework as its primary theoretical lens, this paper examines the story's stylistic elements across three levels: lexical, grammatical, and phonological. The analysis indicated that at lexical level, Tarin’s use of colloquialism, idiomatic expression, and figures of speech i.e., tautology, zeugma, pleonasm, simile, and epithet demonstrate demographic orientation of its characters. At the grammatical level, patterns of parallelism, anaphora, framing, chain repetition, and inversion highlight significant rhetorical and ideological functions in the creation of unreliable first-person narrator. At the phonological level, this study scrutinizes alliteration, assonance and consonance as significant elements contributing to the story’s conversational register. Hence, the findings reveal that Tarin’s stylistic preferences are deliberate, as they mirror the narrator’s moral compass, societal hypocrisy and the socio-cultural landscape of Punjab. This study contributes to the limited body of stylistic scholarship on Pakistani English prose fiction by highlighting analytical productivity of the Leech and Short framework when applied to postcolonial short stories in the South Asian context.