Lexical patterns in the early 21st century Philippine English writing

• Main Authors: Dimaculangan, Nimfa G., Gustilo, Leah E.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2017
• Subjects: English language—Philippines; English language—Philippines > Word formation; Lexicology; English Language and Literature
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/3055
• Institution: De La Salle University

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.