Zahida HUSSAİN, Muhammad ASİF, Ayesha ASLAM, Muhammad Asim MAHMOOD

Divergent Patterns of Variant Tag Questions in Pakistani English: A Corpus-based Comparative Study

The research explores forms and function of variant tag questions (VTQs) in the native and non-native Englishes. For the said purpose, patterns of VTQs in Pakistani English are compared with two native (British and New Zealand) and two non-native (Indian and Singaporean) varieties. The components of the International Corpus of English, henceforth ICE (Greenbaum & Nelson, 1996) of the said varieties, have been used. Each ICE component consists of one- million-word corpus of the regional variety, with a common design, in order to ensure maximum comparability between the components (Nelson 1996). The ICE samples the English of adults (age 18 or over) who have been educated through medium of English to at least the end of secondary schooling. Convenient sampling technique is used to collect data. All the possible tags were extracted using AntConc 3.5.9 and the collocation were then studied. The results revealed that VTQs are under-used in non-native Englishes while least used in Pakistani English. As for the forms of VTQs, Pakistani speakers follow the native speakers and observe the grammatical rules. The functions of VTQs are analysed in Pakistani English, following Axelsson’s (2011) model, and compared with that of Indian English as both varieties share almost similar linguistic and sociocultural backgrounds. The results show that declarative VTQs are preferred to seek and exchange information in both the varieties. The research suggests that further linguistic entities may be explored to observe the similarities/differences in native and non-native varieties, including Indian and Pakistani Englishes, to establish their identities.

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