Patterns of Verb Complementation in Pakistani English

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the verb complementation patterns, and their frequencies and distributions, in Pakistani English. The data has been taken from The Pakistani Written English (PWE), comprising a sample of 1,867 sentences taken randomly but proportionately from different sentence categories formed on the basis of number of words. The PWE is a corpus of written Pakistani English having 29 different written text categories, 1,477 files, and 2,119,626 words. Keeping in mind the different verb complementation patterns mentioned by Greenbaum and Quirk (1990), Quirk et al. (1972 and 1985) and Greenbaum (1995), the researcher has manually analyzed the complementation patterns of all the verbs in the data and then calculated each pattern’s frequency and distribution. The findings reveal that Pakistani English uses various verb complementation patterns and that certain patterns are used much more frequently than the others. It was concluded that, as is the nature of language, Pakistani English has internal variations according to the local cultural values, and has also external variations if the findings are compared with the same as explored by Altenberg (1993) in the British English.

Keywords: corpus, verb complementation