Date of Publication

4-27-2011

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Applied Linguistics (Straight Program)

Subject Categories

Applied Linguistics

College

Br. Andrew Gonzalez FSC College of Education

Department/Unit

English and Applied Linguistics

Thesis Adviser

Ma. Lourdes S. Bautista

Defense Panel Chair

Danilo T. Dayag

Defense Panel Member

Sterling M. Plata
Shirley N. Dita
Isabel Pefianco-Martin
Marilu Madrunio-Ranosa

Abstract/Summary

This grammar describes the morphology, syntax, and semantics of the verb in Philippine English. The description was modeled after recent corpus-based grammars, most especially Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik's (1985) pioneering work. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English language. The verb in Philippine English is analyzed from word to sentence level.
The analysis was done on a ten-percent sample of the Philippine component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-PHI). Prior to the preparation of this grammar, ICE-PHI was only a lexical corpus, meaning, it had not undergone part-of-speech tagging or parsing. ICE-PHI underwent tagging with the automatic tagger MakeTag version 1.0. Since the output of the automatic tagger was not 100% accurate, it had to be manually verified and corrected to be able to achieve around 98-99% accuracy. After the tagging had been done, ICE-PHI became compatible with ICE Corpus Utility Program version 3.1.
For this grammar, of the ten-percent sample of ICE-PHI, only the words tagged as V 'verb' and AUX 'auxiliary' were verified, hence, ICE-PHI/10. Only after the tagging and verification did the dataset become usable for the actual analysis following the terminological framework of Quirk et al. (1985).
Verbs in Philippine English are most frequently marked as present tense. Present verb phrase constructions constitute more than two-thirds of all the verb phrases in Philippine English and more than four-fifths of present verb phase constructions indicate states. There are fewer meanings associated with past tense and they are event past, state past, habitual past, and indirect thought. Some of those identified by Quirk et al. (1985), namely attitudinal past and hypothetical past, do not appear to be in use in Philippine English.
As for aspect, the perspectives are more frequent than the progressives, occurring twice as often as the progressives. The meanings associated with perfectives are more varied than those for progressives, whose meaning seems to be reduced to one meaning. Philippine English retains the five meanings associated with perfectives, which are references to (1) a state leading up to the time of orientation, (2) a relevant time zone leading up to the time of orientation, (3) a recent event, (4) a result of an action obtaining up to the time of orientation, and (5) a habit leading up to the time of orientation. On the other hand, progressive constructions in Philippine English seem to generally refer to events that have duration and have not yet reached the end of their duration. Due perhaps to their structural complexity, perfective progressives are rare in Philippine English.
Clauses in Philippine English are generally constructed in active voice. Almost all of those in passive voice are agentless, primarily because passive highlight passive subjects, according less important to the agent, which allows for the optionality of the constituent. Even fewer are GET-passives, which have not yet become a semantically and stylistically neutral alternative to BE-passives in Philippine English.
Philippine English has a unique ordering of preferences of modals that does not follow American English but does not completely veer away from the general English patterning. The use of the subjunctive is one aspect of modality in which Philippine English shows its American heritage Philippine English preference for the mandative subjective in written text categories and the were-subjunctive in the spoken text categories is very much American.
Verb phrases in Philippine English are overwhelming finite. The simpler verb phrase constructions (e.g. studies [S], have been studying [bc] are the more commonly occurring construction in Philippine English, with the most complex construction (e.g. may have been being studies [ABCD] ) not present at all. In the same way, verbs that require fewer compliments are also more common that those that require more complements. Thus, monotransitive and copular complementations occur more frequently compared to complex transitive and ditransitive complementations.

Abstract Format

html

Language

English

Format

Electronic

Electronic File Format

MS WORD

Accession Number

CDTG004891

Shelf Location

Archives, The Learning Commons, 12F Henry Sy Sr. Hall

Physical Description

1 disc ; 4 3/4 inches.

Keywords

Language and languages--Grammars; Language and languages--Usage; Grammar

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