Relative clauses in Philippine English: a diachronic perspective
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Abstract
This paper explores aspects of diachronic change in a non-native variety of English, Philippine English. It uses the Philippine section of the International Corpus of English (sampling period early 1990s) and a new corpus ‘Phil-Brown’, parallel in its design and sampling date (early 1960s) to the LOB and Brown corpora. Comparison is made between PhilE and the two super-varieties, British and American English, drawing from the pioneering work by Leech et al. (2009) on grammatical change in contemporary written English. The study focuses on relative clauses, more particularly that-relatives and wh-relatives. It was found that Philippine English has followed the two super-varieties in experiencing a decline in wh-relatives and an increase in that-relatives, but differs from them in the rapidity with which the changes have occurred, reflecting an attempt to approximate the patterns of its ‘colonial parent’, American English. When we compare the rates of change for the frequencies of that-relatives and wh-relatives across the genres we find more indications of Philippine English progressively aligning itself with American English, and in turn further evidence that the linguistic orientation of Philippine English remains predominantly exonormative.1