A corpus-based study of word-formation creativity in Facebook Philippine English

This paper is a study of English as a second language (ESL) teachers’ and students’ newly coined Facebook (FB) lexical items and expressions. It presents sample FB Philippine English (PhilE) words found in ESL teachers’ and students’ FB posts and messages and the formation mechanisms evident in the lexical items. The lexical items are culled from the researchers-built 50,000-word corpus of FB and FB Messenger conversations posted and sent by the mentioned texts’ contributors from the last quarter of 2016 to 2022. The PhilE neologisms are identified from their surrounding English lexical items and analyzed based on a proposed framework for PhilE word-formation processes, and ESL Englishes well-motivated innovations and criteria in standardizing its usages. Data analysis reveals over a hundred PhilE lexical items that are coined through the analytical frameworks used with the present paper’s additional proposed processes for FB lexical formation, hypocoristic extension, and anagrammatic transposition or backward spelling. The lexical items, in general, are colloquial, marking the informality of the FB PhilE register, although written in English. In terms of lexicon, it is advanced that FB English in the country is a variety of Internet PhilE, which should be taught in Sociolinguistics and ESL classrooms

Speakers' Ambivalent Attitude toward Philippine English: An Issue for Integrating the Variety into ESL Instruction

Philippine English (PhilE) evolution and its roles have brought challenges and issues to the Philippines' English Language Teaching (ELT) classrooms. Filipino ESL teachers are confronted by issues regarding the appropriate variety to teach and whether or not the local variety should be taught or integrated into the teaching of American English (AmE) or British English (BrE) varieties. World Englishes (WE) and PhilE scholars have asserted the variety's legitimacy and intelligibility, and some have been recommending the integration of the variety into the teaching of ESL and assimilating it in English language programs of all curricular levels from elementary to college. However, studies suggest that the PhilE paradigm is not reflected in the country's English curriculum blueprint and college English textbooks. This conceptual paper presents a revisit to PhilE literature that suggests the issue of its speakers' attitude towards it. It claims that ESL teachers and students have an ambivalent attitude toward PhilE and are not yet open to celebrating its existence. It argues that these PhilE users' ambivalence and unwelcoming attitude toward their English variety possibly hinder the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) and the Department of Education (DepEd) from integrating the variety into the English language curricula

Lexical patterns in the early 21st century Philippine English writing

This paper argues that the Philippine English (PhilE) lexicon is growing and merits continual attention. Notable examples of linguistically acceptable neologisms in Philippine English that deserve recognition include: writeshop, probably coined in analogy with workshop, and used to mean a practical writing seminar; kumainments, the blend of the Tagalog word kain or kumain (eat) and the clipped word for commandment, used to refer to instructions on healthy food intake; kakanins, a Tagalog borrowing for heavy snacks which is pluralized in the manner of English plural nouns; and universitywide, an adjective that means ‘across or involving all the campuses of a university.’ In this study, lexical innovations of this type were culled from a newly built 400,000-word corpus of printed texts written from 2005 to 2014. The data from the corpus were augmented with lexical items manually gathered from documents not covered by the text types in the corpus, as well as from announcements publicly posted by Philippine institutions such as the Department of Education, Department of Health, and universities and colleges in the country. A descriptive approach to language was observed in the treatment of the items. The peculiarities were described and given American or British equivalents to clarify localized or additional meanings. © 2017 American Scientific Publishers All rights reserved