Published Online:September 2025
Product Name:The IUP Journal of English Studies
Product Type:Article
Product Code:IJES060925
DOI:10.71329/IUPJES/2025.20.3.61-71
Author Name:Rahul Ramesh Kale, Jayashri Nalkar and Swapnil Prakash Shirsath
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Arts and Humanities
Download Format:PDF
Pages:61-71
This paper examines the stylistic significance of culturally-specific lexical patterns in some of Sudha Murty’s novels, focusing on how these word pairs convey cultural identity and narrative voice. The study uses four representative texts—Mahashweta, Dollar Bahu, Gently Falls the Bakula, and House of Cards—to find and examine examples of culturally-specific lexical patterns. It achieves this by combining a qualitative stylistic approach with corpus-informed methods, such as collocational frequency analysis, using AntConc. These collocational patterns are not viewed as mistakes in the language, but rather as intentional stylistic choices that reflect the influence of Indian English and the author’s cultural background. The analysis reveals that these new collocations serve multiple purposes: they evoke local cultural norms, highlight emotional states, and subtly challenge the linguistic norms associated with native English use. This study situates Murty’s collocational style within the broader context of World Englishes and literary stylistics. It argues that her creative use of language contributes to creating a uniquely Indian narrative identity. The study provides new insights into the intersection of language, culture, and ideology in modern Indian English literature. It demonstrates the importance of collocational analysis in identifying the stylistic foundations of literary texts.
Language, when used in writing, frequently has connotations that go beyond the words themselves.