Aspectual Meaning in Punjabi Verbal Systems: A Cognitive Grammar Analysis of Conversational Discourse among Punjabi Speakers in Jhang

Abstract

This study examines aspectual meaning in the conversational discourse of Punjabi speakers in Jhang district, Pakistan, addressing the gap between form-oriented descriptive grammars and the discourse functions of aspect in spontaneous speech. Grounded in Langacker's Cognitive Grammar, the study treats perfective, habitual, and continuous aspect as construal operations reflecting specificity, focusing, prominence, and perspective. Employing a qualitative, discourse-analytic design, data were collected through audio-recorded naturally occurring conversations among 32 purposively sampled adult native speakers (16 male, 16 female; eight per tehsil across Jhang, Shorkot, Ahmadpur Sial, and Athara Hazari), yielding approximately six hours of speech across eight sessions. Transcripts were coded manually against Langacker's construal taxonomy, with 214 aspectual tokens analyzed. Findings show habitual aspect as most frequent (44.9%), followed by perfective (36.4%) and continuous (18.7%), with aspectual choice systematically linked to foregrounding, evidential stance-taking, and turn continuation. Results confirm Cognitive Grammar's applicability to underexamined South Asian varieties and extend Punjabi dialectological scholarship.