Tag Question Formation in Pakistani and British English: A Corpus-based Comparative Study

Abstract

The study investigates tag-question formation in Pakistani and British English, focusing on their frequency, distribution, and syntactic patterns across different genres. The study aims to compare the structural patterns, similarities, and differences in the formation and use of tag questions in the two varieties. The study is guided by Chomsky’s (1995) Minimalist Program, which provides a theoretical basis for analyzing auxiliary movement, subject agreement, polarity, and syntactic relationships in tag-question constructions. A mixed-method, corpus-based design is employed, using two balanced one-million-word corpora, comprising one million words of Pakistani English and one million words of British English. Each corpus contains five genres: social media, newspapers, academic/informational texts, spoken discourse, and fiction, with 200,000 words allocated to each genre. Tag-question instances are identified and analyzed in AntConc through quantitative frequency analysis and qualitative syntactic analysis supported by tree diagrams. The findings identify 2,112 tag-question occurrences in British English and 652 in Pakistani English. British English shows particularly high frequencies of will (320), doesn’t (317), won’t (296), and isn’t (215), whereas Pakistani English demonstrates a notable preference for isn’t (148), followed by have/haven’t (98), was/wasn’t (79), and did/didn’t (75). Both varieties generally follow auxiliary selection, subject matching, and polarity reversal, while Pakistani English additionally exhibits reduced and particle-based forms such as “isn’t?” and “na?”. The study concludes that Pakistani English shares the core syntactic principles of British English but demonstrates greater structural variation. Future research may examine larger corpora, additional genres, and the pragmatic functions of tag questions across other World Englishes.