Question Tags in Philippine English
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Question Tags in Philippine English Michael Westphal1 Received: 12 November 2019 / Accepted: 5 February 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This study investigates the use of question tags (QTs) in a subcorpus of dialogues from the Philippine component of the International Corpus of English. It takes into account the full range of QT forms used in Philippine English, including English variant QTs as well as English and Tagalog invariant forms. The analysis investigates the effects of text type and pragmatic function on the selection of particular forms. The results show that Filipino speakers use English and Tagalog forms to almost equal proportions, but invariant forms dominate by far over variant ones. Text type has a strong effect on the overall frequency of QTs and on the distribution of individual forms. In addition, function is shown to be a significant factor that influences QT use: speakers preferentially use specific QTs over others for particular functions in specific contexts. The results show that it is beneficial to analyze the full range of QTs to describe the characteristics of Philippine English and to illustrate variety-internal variation. Furthermore, the analysis of English and Tagalog QTs shows that variation in discourse-pragmatic features can provide valuable insights into language contact situations. In conclusion, the study highlights the benefits of small diverse corpora for corpus-pragmatic research as they allow studying pragmatic phenomena in a range of different contexts. Keywords Question tags · Philippine English · International Corpus of English · Text type variation
Introduction The Philippines is a highly multilingual archipelago in South East Asia: according to Ethnologue (Eberhard et al. 2019), 183 living languages coexist in the country. The two principal languages are English, introduced to the Philippines via American colonization starting in 1889, and Tagalog (also called Filipino), the country’s national language. Tagalog is primarily spoken in the largest and most populous * Michael Westphal [email protected] 1
English Seminar, University of Münster (NRW), Münster, Germany
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island Luzon, which is also home to the country’s political and economic capital Manila. In Metro Manila, the combination of English and Tagalog is common in many private and public domains (Thompson 2003). Philippine English (PhiE), the country’s emerging standard variety of English, is strongly influenced by this multilingual embedding (Tupas 2004). Most previous corpus-based descriptions of PhiE have focused on morpho-syntax (Lim and Borlongan 2012) but first corpus-pragmatic studies (Bautista 2011a; Lim and Borlongan 2011) have noted the high presence of Tagalog discourse-pragmatic features in PhiE. Thus, a pragmatic perspective seems promising to assess multilingual variation in PhiE. This paper analyzes question tags (QT), i.e. a specific set of discourse-pragmatic features, in the Philippine component of the International Corpus of English (ICEPHI),
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