Abstract
This thesis presents an investigation of the mandative subjunctive (MS) and its alternative realizations in four Asian Postcolonial Englishes: Philippine English (PHI), Singapore English (SING), Indian English (IND), and Hong Kong English (HK). The majority of the previous studies on the MS in postcolonial Englishes have mainly focused on the investigation of the MS and should-periphrasis using the International Corpus of English (ICE). The aim of this study is to conduct a quantitative analysis of the use of the MS, should-periphrasis, the indicative, other modals, and non-distinct forms, using The Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) to perform the analysis. This study adopts a corpus-based trigger approach based on the same set of mandative triggers as Hundt (2018): demand, recommend, order, require, and request. Hence, the objective of this study is to provide more evidence for 1) how frequently the MS and alternative realizations are used in Asian postcolonial Englishes, 2) what role the mandative triggers play in the distribution of the mandative clauses, and 3) to what extent the Asian English varieties differ from or align with their matrilects, British English (BrE) and American English (AmE). The results are discussed in relation to Schneider’s Dynamic Model. The preliminary analysis shows that PHI and SING produce the MS more frequently than IND and HK. Moreover, the study has been able to provide new evidence which suggests an increase of the MS in HK and IND. The study also shows that IND deviates from the other varieties in its high preference for the alternative realizations. The secondary analysis shows that lexical triggers are the strongest predictors for the realization of the syntactic variants, but the results from GloWbE-IND establish that the predictor variable 'variety' must not be disregarded. The tertiary analysis reveals that HK and PHI align the most with their matrilect, while SING affiliates more with AmE than BrE. IND demonstrates higher frequency of the should-periphrasis than BrE, providing new evidence to IND’s linguistic conservatism. Lastly, this study confirms SING’s advanced level of endonormative stabilization and PHI’s strong nativization features. The analysis has also strengthened the argumentation for HK belonging in an intermediate position between phase two and three, while the results from GloWbE-IND indicate a potential development towards endonormative stabilization.