DefinePK

Abstract

The present study aims to explore the use of verb particles in threeregisters of the English variety used in Azad Jammu and Kashmir(Kashmiri English). The variant use of different grammaticalelements helps determine the features of a local variety of English.Verb particles are the grammatical elements which have been thefocus of researchers lately (Thim, 2012; Zipp & Bernaisch, 2012;Haiden, 2017). The present study explores the use of verb particlesin three registers of Kashmir English namely academic writing,news, and academic spoken discourse. For this purpose, a corpuswas compiled from these three registers of Kashmiri English. Thedata for the newspaper corpus was collected from the Daily Heightthat is published in Muzaffarabad. The data for academic writingcorpus was collected from M. Phil and PhD theses available at thedepartment of English, the university of Azad Jammu & Kashmir.The data for the spoken discourse was collected in the form ofaudio recordings of ESL class lectures and students’ presentations.These recordings transcribed in text format and an overall corpusof the three registers was compiled for the analysis. The corporawere analyzed through AntConc software to examine the use ofverb particles in Kashmiri English. The findings show that theverbs particles are frequently used in all three registers ofKashmiri English. However, Kashmiri English prefer using barewords in place of verb particles where the use of bare verbs do notcause any semantic change in the discourse. The study also showsthat use of verb particles is more common in written discoursethan in spoken discourse of Kashmir English.