The subjunctive mood in Philippine English

Abstract

American English has been observed to be leading the way in the revival of the (mandative) subjunctive, leaving behind British English and its postcolonial “children”. Drawing on data from two sets of corpora, sampled in the 1960s and the 1990s, this paper examines the extent to which Philippine English, a distinctively American-rooted variety, has been following American patterns in its use of the subjunctive (both the mandative and the hypothetical were-subjunctive). Some of the findings reflect the historical exonormative dependence of Philippine English on its American “parent” (notably, its continuing preference for the subjunctive over should-periphrasis, and its dispreference for the indicative, in mandative constructions), while others reflect its evolutionary progression towards endonormative stability (for example its disregard for American maintenance of the traditional formality connotations of the mandative subjunctive, and for the American preference for subjunctive were over indicative was in subordinate counterfactual clauses).

Grammatical Change in the Verb Phrase in Contemporary Philippine English

“…It can be seen that, for the five VP categories studied, findings suggestive of exonormativity (12.4) predominate over those suggestive of endonormativity (2.8). What this suggests is that the findings of earlier studies based on 1960s and 1990s corpora Collins, Borlongan, Lim and Yao, 2014;Collins, 2015), that the grammar of PhilE has yet to achieve linguistic autonomy, remain valid into the current millennium, and support Schneider's (2007) claim that PhilE has not yet fully entered his Phase 4 (Endonormative Stabilisation). This is the first diachronic study that I know of which exploits the resources of the massive GloWbE corpus.…”

“…3 Several recent studies which make use of data from Phil-Brown and ICE-Phil suggest that it may be premature to claim that PhilE has achieved full linguistic autonomy/endonormativity. A strong tendency for PhilE to co-pattern with AmE is found, for example, in its strong AmE-like support for the relativiser that ; in its continuing preference for the subjunctive over should-periphrasis in mandative constructions (Collins, Borlongan, Lim and Yao, 2014); and in its strong frequency increase for the quasimodals . The special status of PhilE as the only Postcolonial World English with an American rather than British "parent," suggests that the co-patterning identified in these studies is not merely ascribable to the global transnational attraction of AmE.…”

When to (not) split the infinitive: factors governing patterns of syntactic variation in Twitter-style Philippine English

“…It seems that the preference for the split construction has increased over the past 11 years (table 2 and figure 7f). The findings are a welcome contribution to the relatively small amount of PhE literature discussing the diachronic dimension of PhE (Collins et al 2014;Borlongan & Dita 2015;Gonzales 2023b), but they seem to be at odds with the findings on apparent time in the previous paragraph, which show a decreasing preference for the split infinitive construction. However, I argue that the findings are not contradictory, but complementary.…”

The Holistic Advantage: Unified Quantitative Modeling for Less-Biased, In-Depth Insights into (Socio)Linguistic Variation

“…For instance, Samejon's (2022) study focused on phonological variation in PhE and investigated how linguistic factors like phonological environment and suffixation as well as social factors like sex and profession influence the production of the word-final /z/ sound in acrolectal PhE speakers. Other scholars like Collins et al (2014) have examined the patterns of morphosyntactic variation using PhE corpus data and found genre to be a robust factor of variation. Gonzales and Hiramoto (2020) also investigated similar types of alternations in Philippine Chinese English or Lannang English data, with an emphasis on the impact of ethnicity and region on variation.…”

“…Moreover, most quantitative studies tend to focus on a narrow set of variables, often of a social, diachronic, or stylistic nature, such as ethnicity and region in Gonzales and Hiramoto's (2020) study, or genre and register in Collins et al (2014) and Hernandez's (2023) research. This limited scope can create the illusion that only social, diachronic, and stylistic factors influence internal variation in EngPH when, in reality, the situation can be more intricate.…”