Verb Particles in Kashmiri English

A Corpus Based Comparative Study of Three Registers

Abstract

The present study aims to explore the use of verb particles in three
registers of the English variety used in Azad Jammu and Kashmir
(Kashmiri English). The variant use of different grammatical
elements helps determine the features of a local variety of English.
Verb particles are the grammatical elements which have been the
focus of researchers lately (Thim, 2012; Zipp & Bernaisch, 2012;
Haiden, 2017). The present study explores the use of verb particles
in three registers of Kashmir English namely academic writing,
news, and academic spoken discourse. For this purpose, a corpus
was compiled from these three registers of Kashmiri English. The
data for the newspaper corpus was collected from the Daily Height
that is published in Muzaffarabad. The data for academic writing
corpus was collected from M. Phil and PhD theses available at the
department of English, the university of Azad Jammu & Kashmir.
The data for the spoken discourse was collected in the form of
audio recordings of ESL class lectures and students’ presentations.
These recordings transcribed in text format and an overall corpus
of the three registers was compiled for the analysis. The corpora
were analyzed through AntConc software to examine the use of
verb particles in Kashmiri English. The findings show that the
verbs particles are frequently used in all three registers of
Kashmiri English. However, Kashmiri English prefer using bare
words in place of verb particles where the use of bare verbs do not
cause any semantic change in the discourse. The study also shows
that use of verb particles is more common in written discourse
than in spoken discourse of Kashmir English.