Some notes on Philippine English grammar

ARIANE MACALINGA BORLONGAN

IN the last few weeks, I discussed vocabulary items that are unique or have some special usage in Philippine English. Today, I draw your attention to some of its grammatical features. I must admit that my research on the subject has mainly been on its grammar; my dissertation focused on the grammar of verb phrases in Philippine English. I shall highlight a few examples, which, based on my own research and experience, are quite frequent.

The most common feature is the agreement between the subject and verb. Our elementary school teachers would state the rule: singular subjects will have singular verbs, and plural subjects will have plural verbs. However, in Philippine English, when there is an intervening phrase between the subject and verb, the verb sometimes does not agree in terms of number with its subject, as in “The front cover of those books have been damaged by recent flooding.” In this example, the verb agrees in number with the noun closer to it — “books” — rather than the subject, which is “cover.” Subject-verb agreement, though, is one grammatical rule that does not have any consequence on meaning, even when it’s not observed.

Another feature is its occasional preference for the perfective aspect, instead of past tense, to denote past events. The fact of the matter is that past tense and present perfect are indeed interchangeable, but not all the time. The present perfect requires some sense of recency, but the past tense could refer to a time further back in history. Hence, “I just ate my lunch” and “I have just eaten my lunch” may be interchangeable, but not “Philippine independence was declared on June 12, 1898” and “Philippine independence has been declared on June 12, 1898.” I want to note, though, that the preference for the present perfective over the simple past is a primarily British English trend more than American English.

The prepositional system in Philippine languages is not as complex as English. Note that Tagalog only has “sa.” As such, and as I have mentioned before, a few verb-preposition combinations have been considered a feature of Philippine English: “based from” instead of “based on,” “result to” in place of “result in,” and “fill up (a form)” instead of “fill in.”

The last feature I want to mention is the agreement of a pronoun with the noun it refers to. We are reminded that pronouns must agree both in terms of gender and number with the noun they refer to. In this regard, it is possible that there is again an interference of Philippine language grammar, which also has a much simpler pronoun system, usually without gender. It is not surprising to hear usages where “he/him” would refer to a woman. And there is also that which is often mentioned as a joke: “It’s raining, aren’t they?” However, of the four features of Philippine English grammar I discussed here, it seems that pronoun agreement with its noun is something that should be observed, and deviations from this should be avoided.

I mention these seemingly classic observations regarding Philippine English grammar, and I shall mention more in my future columns, including how this grammar has changed through the decades.

Ariane Macalinga Borlongan is one of the leading scholars on English in the Philippines who is also doing pioneering work on language in the context of migration. He is the youngest to earn a doctorate in linguistics, at 23, from De La Salle University. He has had several teaching and research positions in Germany, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Poland, Singapore and Taiwan. He is currently an associate professor of sociolinguistics at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in Japan.