Preposition stranding and pied-piping in Philippine English: A corpus-based study

• Main Author: Dayag, Danilo T.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2016
• Subjects: English language—Philippines; English language—Philippines > Prepositions; English language—Philippines > Prepositional phrases; Language and Literacy Education
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/3559; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/faculty_research/article/4561/type/native/viewcontent/CBO9781107477186.008
• Institution: De La Salle University

This chapter aims to find out whether preposition stranding (i.e., a preposition that appears without an NP complement) or pied-piping (i.e., a preposition in clause-initial position) (Hoffmann 2007) is a phenomenon in the Philippine variety of English. Using spoken and written texts from the Philippine component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-PHI), the study describes the distribution of preposition stranding and pied-piping in preposed, interrogative, and wh - clauses. Data show that preposition stranding appeared more frequently in spoken texts than in written texts and that, while pied-piping (which is associated with formal or expository registers) showed up in both spoken and written texts, the frequency of its occurrence was higher in the spoken than in the written genre. Findings of the study are related to Filipinos’ tendency to prefer the formal style of English, regardless of the context in which the language is used, or what Gonzalez (1991: 334) calls the “stylistic underdifferentiation” of Philippine English. © Cambridge University Press 2016.