Semantic Change of the Selected Cebuano Words

PACLIC / The University of the Philippines Visayas Cebu College Cebu City, Philippines / November 20-22, 200

English Lexical Borrowings in Chabacano Television Newscasts: Categories, Patterns, Affixations, and Semantic Fields

Lexical borrowings refer to the borrowing of words from one language to another to fill in certain words that do not have a direct translation to the local language. The study is anchored in the Phylogenetic Change Theory made by Hockett (2008) and the Deficit Hypothesis authored by Kachru (1994). The present study explores the words lexically loaned from the English language in the Chabacano language. Raw data were taken, for analysis from Dateline Zamboanga, a local teleradyo program airing regularly on both television and radio broadcasts. The borrowed English words were then tallied and sorted based on lexical categories, patterns, affixation, and semantic fields. In the investigation, frequency count was utilized to determine the number of iterations and percentage composition of the borrowed words. After investigating, the results are as follows: (1) nouns were the most borrowed part of speech, concretized by the 74.585% of lexically borrowed words being nouns; (2) phrase-borrowing is more prevalent than sentence level borrowing evidenced by 90.615% of lexical borrowings occurring in the phrase-level; (3) borrowed words were originally English nouns but were transformed into verbs by means of Chabacano prefixation. Notably, the absence of suffixation gives prefixation total prevalence, and; (4) the semantic field where these borrowed words were found to be frequently utilized was in reference to government agencies or offices comprising of 25.476%. The results give the impression that the interlocutors in Dateline Zamboanga incorporate English utterances into the Chabacano language thus, modifying the former to suit their communicative purposes

Documenting online writing practices: The case of nominal plural marking in Zamboanga Chabacano

The emergence of computer-mediated communication has brought about new opportunities for both speakers and researchers of minority or under-described languages. This paper shows how the analysis of spontaneous contemporary language samples from online social networks can make a contribution to the documentation and description of languages like Chabacano, a Spanish-derived creole spoken in the Philippines. More specifically, we focus on nominal plural marking in the Zamboangueño variety, a still imperfectly understood feature, by examining a corpus composed of texts from online sources. The attested combination of innovative and vestigial features requires a close look at the high contact environment, different levels of metalinguistic awareness or even some language ideologies. The findings shed light on the wide variety of plural formation strategies which resulted from the contact of Spanish with Philippine languages. Possible triggers, such as animacy, definiteness or specificity, are also examined and some future research areas suggested