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Abstract
The present paper attempts to bring to light the use of corpus software AntConc as a tool to analyze and interpret the various linguistic aspects of Khushwant Singh’s short stories- “Mr. Kanjoos and the Great Miracle”, and “A Town Called Alice” to uncover the miscellaneous postcolonial issues such as search for identity, cultural clash, colonialism, racialism, impacts of displacements, psychological trauma, power, politics which are viewed in the hegemonic relationships. Here Roman Jakobson’s six functions of language such as referential, poetic, conative, phatic, emotive, and metalingual are also employed to bring out the postcolonial stylistic features of the short stories. The endeavor of Khushwant Singh as a postcolonial writer is illuminated by the hybridized use of the English language in a creative and innovative manner suited to the various motives of the short stories. As an act of dissidence, Khushwant Singh’s use of hybridized language or Hinglish instead of English acclaims his sense of freedom from the linguistic hegemony of the colonial English. Apart from this, various appropriation devices propounded by Braj B. Kachru and Bill Ashcroft et al such as glossing, translation, use of untranslated words, syntactical fusions, neologism, calques, proficiency levels in the uses of English and englishes according to different class, culture and society, code mixing and code switching etc. are given due consideration which further help in illustrating the functions of language to point out the Post Colonial issues in the short stories.