top of page

Tagalog Particles in Philippine English: The Case of Ba, Na, No, and Pa

JooHyuk Lim & Ariane Macalinga Borlongan
Volume
42
Issue
NA
Pages
-
58
73
Download

Date of publication:

December 31, 2011

This paper reports on corpus-based case analyses of "ba" , "na" , and "pa" when these enclitic particles are inserted in Philippine English texts. The corpus exploration made also furthers on Bautista‘s (2011) initial investigation of "no" in Philippine English, because she has considered the focal word to be a pragmatic particle in the variety of English in the Philippines. The analyses made for this paper were on ICE-PH with the aid of WordSmith Tools 5.0. "Ba" was shown to alternate with auxiliary inversion in Philippine English yes-no questions and intensify the interrogative force of wh- questions where auxiliary inversions necessarily take place. "Na" and "pa" also allow for alternative variants in the expression of various meanings in Philippine English, continuity, recentness, tentativeness, and urgency, among others. Lastly, "no" was seen to be functioning in place of the very frequent English tag questions in Philippine English, which are morphosyntactically more complicated.

bottom of page