Morphological and Syntactic Characteristics of Adjectives in Philippine English: A Corpus-Based Description

What it is about

The paper describes adjectives in Philippine English from the Corpus of Philippine English (COPE): 30 conversation transcripts (about 450 minutes) and 50 press news reports (about 25,000 words). The Stanford tagger labelled JJ, and the authors searched every JJ hit in AntConc and checked each by hand. Of 2,621 conversation hits, 141 were wrongly tagged, leaving 2,480 adjectives; of 1,557 news hits, 16 were wrong, leaving 1,541. Attributive adjectives are the most frequent in news (1,256 against 1,184 in conversation), while predicative ones are frequent in conversation (1,287 against 274 in news). Comparison follows the usual English pattern, with one case of double comparison. Derived adjectives are mostly -al, -ic, -ive and -ble, and the authors find new compounds but no new derivations. Nine postpositive adjectives occur, all in conversation, and some transfer patterns from Tagalog, such as the invariant tag "right?" and repeated adjectives ("a big big big lawn").

Ideas

• I1. en/src/tag.rs and en/src/ptag.rs: report a per-tag precision on the hand-checked JJ sample by register, and list the confusion classes (adverb, noun, verb, interjection) that the authors report, so the tagger's errors are shown next to the counts they change.
• I2. 15. Adjectives and adverbs: the attributive and predicative split as a rule. An adjective is attributive when it is directly before a noun, predicative after a linking verb (be, become, seem). In UD this is amod against an adjective that heads its clause with a cop dependent (UD v2 has no acomp); count both in Mova's trees and compare with the paper's register contrast.
• I3. Comparison as an explicit rule: monosyllabic adjectives and those ending in -y take -er and -est, others take more and most. Flag doubled forms as a separate class, and test the rule on a held-out list, with the single double comparison as the negative example.
• I4. Register table: a count of each syntactic function by register, written as a small table in 37. Register and variation, computed by a Rust tool, so that another corpus can be compared with the same code.

For Mova

The chapters are 15. Adjectives and adverbs (form, comparison and function) and 37. Register and variation (the register contrast). The code points are en/src/tag.rs and en/src/ptag.rs (the JJ tags), and en/src/morph.rs for the comparison rule. The measure: JJ precision by register on a hand-checked sample, the attributive and predicative counts from the trees, and the comparison-rule accuracy on held-out adjectives, run twice for determinism. The corpus is not in the repo; use a licence-clean sample.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{aquino2024morphological,
  title = {{Morphological and Syntactic Characteristics of Adjectives in Philippine English: A Corpus-Based Description}},
  author = {Aquino, Luvee Hazel and Aquino, Christine Jane},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 38th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation},
  year = {2024},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2024.paclic-1.144/}
}

References

29 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Bernardo, A. S. (2017). Philippine English in the ESL classroom: A much closer look. Philippine ESL Journal (19), 117-144. find
2. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Pearson Education Limited. find
3. Blankenship, K. L. & Craig, T. Y. (2011). Language use and persuasion: Multiple roles for linguistic styles. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 5(4), 194-205. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2011.00344.x ↗
4. Borlongan, A. M. (2011). Some aspects of the morphosyntax of Philippine English. Studies on Philippine English: Exploring the Philippine component of the English, 187-199. International Corpus of Borlongan, A. M. (2016). Relocating Philippine English in Schneider’s dynamic model. Asian Englishes, 18 (3), 232–241. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13488678.2016.1223067 ↗
5. Borlongan, A. M. & Lim, J.H. (2012). Distinctive grammatical features of Philippine English: A meta-synthesis of corpus-based studies. Poster presented at the 33rd International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME) Conference, May 30-June 3, 2012, Louvain, Belgium. find
6. Cao, J. & Fang, A.C. (2009). Investigating variations in adjective use across different text categories. Advances in Computational Linguistics, 41, 207-216. https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:73678382 ↗
7. Celce-Murcia, M. Larsen-Freeman, D., & Williams, H.A. (1983). The grammar book: An ESL/EFL teacher's course. Newbury House. find
8. Crystal, D. (2003). English as a global language. Cambridge University Press. find
9. Crystal, D. (2012). Language and the internet. Cambridge University Press. find
10. Dimaculangan, N. & Gustilo, L. (2018). A closer look at Philippine English word-formation frameworks. Advanced Science Letters, 24, (11) 8384-8388. https://doi.org/10.1166/asl.2018.12569 ↗
11. Gustilo, L. Pura, C.M., & Biermeier, T. (2021). Coronalexicon: Meanings and word-formation processes of pandemic-related lexemes across English varieties. Journal of Language Teaching, Linguistics, and Literature, 27 (4), 1-15. http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2021-2704-01 ↗
12. Hadziahmtovic Jurida, S. & Pavlovic, T. (2023). Noun compounds and adjective compounds in English. Science International Journal 2(4), 73-80. https://doi.org/10.35120/sciencej0204073h ↗
13. Hagman, T. (2020). Competing forms of adjectival comparison in some modern varieties of English across the world. Master’s thesis. Tampere University. https://trepo.tuni.fi/handle/10024/122360 ↗
14. Huddleston, R. & Pullum, G.K. (2002). The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge University Press. find our card
15. Hundt, M., Hay, J. & Gordon, E. (2004). New Zealand English: Morphosyntax. In B. Kortmann & E. W. Schneider (Eds.) A handbook of varieties of English, pp. 560‐592. Mouton de Gruyter. find
16. Lieber, R. (2016). English nouns: The ecology of nominalization. Cambridge University Press. find
17. Lim, J. K. & Borlongan, A. M. (2012). Corpus-based grammatical studies of Philippine English and language assessment: Issues and perspectives. The Assessment Handbook, 8, 51-61. find
18. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. Longman Group Limited. find
19. Schneider, E.W. (2003). The dynamics of new Englishes: From identity construction to dialect birth. Language, 79, 233-281. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4489419 ↗
20. Schneider, E.W. (2007). Postcolonial English: Varieties of English around the world. Cambridge University Press. find
21. Schröder, U. (2010). Speech styles and functions of speech from a cross-cultural perspective. Journal of Pragmatics, 42 (2), 466-476. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2009.06.014 ↗
22. Sleeman, P. (2019). Adjectivalization in morphology. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.01 3.558 ↗
23. Stanford Natural Language Processing Group. (2023). Stanford Log-linear Part-Of-Speech Tagger. https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/tagger.html ↗
24. Suárez-Gómez, C. & Seoane, E. (2023). A look at the nativization of Bangladeshi English through corpus data. Miscelánea, 68, 15–37. https://papiro.unizar.es/ojs/index.php/misc/article/vi ew/8760 ↗
25. Suárez-Gómez, C. & Tomàs-Vidal, C. (2024). Adjective comparison in African varieties of English. Research in Corpus Linguistics, 12(1), 89–113. https://doi.org/10.32714/ricl.12.01.04 ↗
26. Toutanova, K., Klein, D., Manning, C., & Singer, Y. (2003). Feature-rich part-of-speech tagging with a cyclic dependency network. In Proceedings of the 2003 Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, https://aclanthology.org/N03-1033 252-259. ↗
27. Trips, C. (2003). Lexical semantics and diachronic morphology: The development of -hood, -dom and -ship in the history of English. Walter de Gruyter – Max Niemeyer Verlag. find
28. Westphal, M. (2020). Question tags in Philippine English. Corpus Pragmatics, 4(4), 401-422. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-020-00078-w ↗
29. Yaguchi, M., Iyeiri, Y. & Baba, Y. (2010). Speech style and gender distinctions in the use of very and real/really: An analysis of the Corpus of Spoken Professional American English. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(3), 585-597. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2009.08.002 ↗

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aquino-2024-morphological-syntactic-characteristics-adjectives-philippine/