The Syntactic Variations in Adverb Phrase ‘As well’ in Initial Position in Pakistani English (PakE): A Corpus Based Study

Abstract

This study aims to pinpoint the variations in Adverb Phrase ‘As well’ in the initial position in PakE, and investigate the influence of the substrate linguistic effect of the Urdu language on PakE. For this study, a corpus GlowbE-PK was utilized. In total, 192 Adverb phrases in the initial position of the sentence were found. This study utilized the mixed method research and also kept in view the Sociolinguistic Variation and World Englishes conventions of research.

The number and frequency of tokens per million words were calculated. Overall, PakE reveals a frequency of 3.84% per 1 million words. The results and discussions indicated a noticeable variation in the Adverb phrase of PakE from Standard BrE. This research also confirms the negative linguistic influence of the substrate language Urdu on Pakistani English in the use of the Adverb phrase 'As well', although the substrate language clearly shows the influence on many other features of PakE, as in Adjective phrase – the use of Double comparatives and superlatives. Furthermore, this research identifies the same feature Adverb phrase ‘as well’ in other varieties of English.