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. languages/en/15-adjectives-adverbs.md: 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 languages/en/37-register-and-variation.md, computed by a Rust tool, so that another corpus can be compared with the same code.

For Mova

The chapters are languages/en/15-adjectives-adverbs.md (form, comparison and function) and languages/en/37-register-and-variation.md (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.

Library summary

The Research library's own summary of the paper, in our words — not the paper's text.

Written by Mova (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text. Original — aclanthology.org/2024.paclic-1.144.pdf

Summary

The authors investigate how adjectives behave in Philippine English (PhE), since corpus-based work on this topic is still scarce. The data come from the new Corpus of Philippine English (COPE), compiled in 2023. Two contrasting parts of the corpus are used: informal spoken conversations and written press news reports. The texts were part-of-speech tagged with the Stanford POS Tagger using the Penn Treebank tagset. Then all words tagged JJ were extracted in AntConc, each instance was checked manually, and the data were analyzed against the grammars of Quirk et al., Biber et al., and Huddleston & Pullum. Overall, adjectives in PhE behave as these grammars describe. Short words more often form degrees of comparison with suffixes, while longer and derived ones do so periphrastically, with more/most. No new adjectives formed by affixation were found, but compounding is frequent. The authors take this as a sign of a certain lexico-grammatical conservatism of PhE. Some traces of influence from the speakers' native languages were also noted. The study adds to the description of PhE grammar within the World Englishes framework, and the authors propose using its findings in English language teaching.

Key points

Data: 30 recordings of conversations (about 450 minutes, mesolectal speakers) and 50 news texts (about 500 words each, about 25 thousand words in total) from COPE.
Quality of automatic tagging: the tagger labeled 4,178 words as JJ. In the conversations, 141 of 2,621 turned out to be erroneous, and in the news, 16 of 1,557. After manual checking, 2,480 and 1,541 adjectives remained, respectively. Thus, the tagger makes noticeably more errors on informal speech.
Morphology: double comparison occurred only once. Among monosyllabic adjectives, only fond, keen, and safe took periphrastic comparison, and likely was compared only with more/most.
Syntax: the corpus contains attributive, predicative, and postpositive adjectives. Other functions, such as an adjective as the head of a noun phrase, were not found.
Probable L1 influence: repetition of an adjective for intensification, the tag question "right?" as an equivalent of Tagalog "di ba", and an atypical word order with "God-willing". The authors link the latter to a calque of Tagalog "Sana, awa ng Diyos" or Visayan "puhon".

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/}
}

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