Corpus based Analysis of Pakistani and British Varieties of English A Case of Cognate Object Constructions

Abstract

This study provides a small scale survey of English verbs that can take cognate objects (CO) both in Pakistani and British fictions in English language. Frequencies of the verbs along with cognate object constructions occurring in Pakistani English fiction (PEF) and British English fiction (BEF) have been compared and analyzed using AntConc 3.2.2w (windows) 2008. Several syntactic properties of cognate objects have also been investigated: such as the ability to take modifier, possibility of the cognate objects to be used as pronouns (it – pronominalization) have also been verified in cognate object constructions (COC) in Pakistani as well as in British English varieties. Focus of the study is on the characteristics of English verbs. It has been found that cognate object constructions are used less in PEF as compared to their presence in BEF. Proving the fact that cognate object constructions as the complex sentence structure. As English is not the native language of Pakistan, so the writers usually avoid the usage of cognate object constructions in PEF. The study establishes Pakistani English as an independent variety using its own distinctive linguistic features.

Key words: Cognate object,   Cognate object construction,   corpus,    modifier, it – pronominalization.