MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF BAPSI SIDHWA’S NOVELS: A CORPUS STYLISTICS APPROACH

Abstract

This study investigates the morphological architecture of five major novels by Bapsi Sidhwa (The Crow Eaters, The Pakistani Bride, Ice-Candy-Man, An American Brat, Water) through a corpus-stylistic lens. We adopt the Neurobiber framework (Alkiek et al., 2025) for scalable, interpretable extraction of 96 lexico-grammatical features, focusing here on four key processes: compounding, affixation, alternation, and suppletion. A digital corpus was processed with AntConc to generate concordance lines and frequency counts for each morphological category. Quantitative tables and KWIC excerpts illustrate these patterns across narratives, showing consistency of morphological strategies over three decades of writing. Findings contribute to morphological theory in World Englishes and postcolonial stylistics by demonstrating how global English word-formation processes interact with localized lexical elements to construct Sidhwa’s distinct narrative voice. Implications include methodological validation of Neurobiber framework for literary morphology and insights into English-vernacular hybridity in South Asian fiction.