Philippine E-Journals

Morphosyntactic Features of English Variety in Davao City, Philippines

Charlie E. Dayon

Discipline: Linguistics

 

Abstract:

The study describes the morphosyntactic features of English variety in Davao City. In attaining this purpose, I used structural analysis of qualitative research method. In ensuring its trustworthiness, I used some samples from multiple sources of corpora found in this city, analyzed, and classified them according to genres, such as student composition, print media, virtual communication, billboard ads, and office communication. After analyzing the samples, I discovered that the morphological features of the English variety were prominently affixation (prefixation e.g., gina-close, paglunch, naopen, nagpositive, ipa-discharge) and borrowing (transliteration into dialect orthography, e.g., …who was my inspairation; our guest pls. do not inter; hill side dreep wood furniture). The syntactic features, on the other hand, were dominantly run-ons (comma splice: “It starts in the acquaintance party, then sa assemblies, then aside from that…”), verb-tense inconsistency (e.g., “As we do our activity this morning, I was able to learn many strategies …”), and wordiness (e.g.,“I would like to take this opportunity to briefly explain our publication process.”). These findings made me conclude that the emergence of these peculiarities was brought about by the influence of Visayan language in the region. Hence, the emergence of this new variety of Philippine English could be identified as localized English.