INTENSIFICATION IN PAKISTANI AND BRITISH ENGLISH: A CORPUS-BASED COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Shakir Shahzad; Behzad Anwar; Rabia Qayyum

doi:10.59075/jsrd.v7i6.492

Authors

Shakir Shahzad PhD Scholar, Department of English, University of Gujrat
Behzad Anwar Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Gujrat
Rabia Qayyum Lecturer in English, Govt. Graduate College for Women, Mandi Bahauddin, Pakistan

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.59075/jsrd.v7i6.492

Keywords:

Intensifiers, Pakistani English, British English, Corpus linguistics, GloWbE corpus, Variational pragmatics, Collocational analysis, Language variation

Abstract

Intensifiers play an important role in expressing degree, emphasis, and attitude in the English language. Their usage varies across the varieties of the English language due to underlying pragmatic and cultural differences. This paper examines the use of nine intensifiers: ‘very’, ‘so’, ‘really’, ‘rather’, ‘pretty’, ‘quite’, ‘fairly’, ‘totally’, and ‘absolutely’ in Pakistani and British English. Explicitly, the study compares their frequency, collocational behavior, semantic prosody, and pragmatic tendencies. The researcher utilizes the Global Web-Based English Corpus (GloWbE) and the analysis draws on variational pragmatics (Schneider & Barron, 2008), which is supported by usage-based constructional views and corpus-semantic approaches to evaluation. The findings highlight that Pakistani and British users differ in their preferences and understanding of the nine intensifiers. British English has a balanced and rational use of intensifiers, whereas Pakistani speakers tend to use strong and emphatic intensifiers. The differences indicate a functional shift and the evolving indigenousness of the Pakistani English variety.