The Syntactic Variations in Verb Phrase – Double Modals in Pakistani English (PakE) and Malaysian English (MyE): A Comparative and Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

This study aims to detect the variations and compare the use of Verb Phrase – Double Modals in PakE and MyE. For this study, two recently released corpora – GlowbE-PK and GlowbE-MY were utilized. Twenty Verb phrases with double Modals in PakE and MyE were selected from thousands of concordance lines and a large amount of text. This study utilized mixed method research and also kept in view the Sociolinguistic Variation and World Englishes conventions of research by utilizing corpora.

The Frequency of each token (phrase), and then the accumulative and average frequencies of both Englishes were given separately. A comparative analysis of both varieties of English was done. It was an interesting fact to know that MyE displays comparatively more use of VP-Double Modals than PakE. The frequency of VP - Double Modals in MyE is 1.88, which is 0.41 more than the frequency of VP – Double Modals in PakE.

The results and discussion indicated a noticeable variation in the use of VP with Double Modals of PakE and MyE from Standard British English (BrE). This research also indicates a linguistic pattern in the different dialects of English. The PakE and MyE have different phases of development, and contact languages with English in both varieties are also different. However, they both display the use of Double Modals.