Exploration of the mandative subjunctive in Pakistani English

Abstract

The study at hand explores the alternation between the mandative subjunctive and its equivalent construction with the modal verb should in Pakistani English. The study enhances understanding of the alternation both by focusing on Pakistani English as a relatively under-researched postcolonial variety of English and by complementing the traditional syntactic variables that influence the choice of subjunctive with a sociolinguistic dimension in the form of the language user's gender. Using data from the SAVE and SAVE2020 corpora, we investigate the following research questions: What factors influence the mandative subjunctive/should alternation, is gender a significant influence on the choice and has the subjunctive choice changed over time? A multifactorial model was fitted on the 504 extracted data points with the following predictors: gender, lexical diversity, linking word, negation, newspaper, primer, range, readability, subject number, subject person, time, trigger lemma, voice and word count. The results show an effect of gender and time in interaction with several other variables. The interactions show significant diachronic adjustments to the constructional preferences of the individual subjunctive triggers and reveals that across these triggers, women are generally more likely to pick the subjunctive over its modal alternant than men.