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 lexicogrammatical 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.