Verbal Gender Agreement in English and Haryanvi: A Comparative Morphosyntactic Study

Abstract

The study aims to evaluate verbal gender agreements in Pakistani English and Haryanvi languages through morphosyntactic analyses to determine how these two typologically distinct languages encode or resist the gender assignment system in verbal patterns. Gender plays a vital role in defining agreement structures within morphological and syntactic patterns. English determines less gender agreement through verbs, whereas Haryanvi have an overt and systematic system in which verbs form clearly modulate according to the gender of the subject or object. The study is descriptive and Corbett’s Gender Assignment System 2006 used as theoretical framework. The findings show that English verbs are not marked for gender and remain the same for masculine, feminine, or non-binary subjects, while Haryanvi verbs change form according to the subject’s gender, with endings like -ɑː for masculine and -i: for feminine. Future researchers can expand this study by examining additional Indo-Aryan varieties and using corpus-based, experimental, and sociolinguistic approaches to gain a deeper understanding of verbal gender agreement.