COLLOCATION PATTERNS IN PAKISTANI BILLBOARD ADVERTISEMENTS: A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20786534Keywords:
Advertising Discourse, Billboard Advertising, Collocation Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, Outdoor Advertising, Pakistani EnglishAbstract
The purpose of this study is to provide the first corpus-based study of collocation patterns in billboard advertisements in Pakistan. A corpus of 70+ unique billboard texts (793 tokens) was created for the four major cities of Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad and Multan across the years 2021 to 2025. The high-frequency words were analysed in LancsBox v5.5.1 using a 5L/5R window for Mutual Information (MI) scores. The lexical associations were very strong, as demonstrated by all the collocates, with three main discourse strategies emerging: promotional (free, limited, offers), claims of quality and improvement (new, best, upgrade), and action-oriented imperatives (get, available). The results offer a new MI-based collocation frequency list for advertising English in the Pakistani context, with implications for the development of advertising copy, English instruction in Pakistan and the localisation of worldwide marketing strategies in South Asian contexts.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Maham Shuaib, Muhammad Kamran Abbas Ismail, Mishal Abbas, Mubara Ghani (Author)
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