Appraising Environmental Beauty of Northern Areas of Pakistan through Rhetoric Expressions in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Thinner Than Skin: An Ecolinguistic Perspective

Abstract

Environmental study is rising as a hot topic nowadays and there is a striking awareness of sustaining asymmetry between man and nature. How individuals ponder human relationships with the earth and other living creatures have changed deliberately. Ecolinguistics is a sub-field of sociolinguistics that studies the role of language in connecting human beings and their natural environment. Therefore, this research investigates the use of rhetorical expressions by Anglophone author Uzma Aslam Khan and her characters Nadir, Farhana, and Maryam and their attitudes, graduation, and engagement with the natural environment. For this purpose, the "Appraisal Model" (Martin and White, 2000) has been used as a theoretical framework that sheds light on Arran Stibbe's (2015) ecolinguistic model of Evaluation. It highlights several rhetorical devices through which the narrators expressed their positive attitude towards "the stories they lived by." They rhetorically bespeak the readers to appreciate the environmental beauty of the Northern areas of Pakistan as it is surrounded by beauty and provides a therapeutic potency to build a strong relationship between man and his motherland. The study is limited as it only attempts to praise the beauty of Northern areas by appraisal patterns and does not include the other counterparts of Pakistan. However, the study is significant as it endeavors to appreciate the environmental beauty of Pakistan and provides new avenues for scholars to bridge a gap between ecolinguistics and other areas of linguistics, such as critical discourse analysis, pragmatics, and semantics.