Tatel bags 2019 LSP-OGP Award

Francis B. Tatel (University of the Philippines, Diliman) is the winner of this year's Linguistic Society of the Philippines Outstanding Graduate Paper (LSP-OGP) Award. He presented "One step closer to Phase 4 in Schneider's Dynamic Model", where he was said to receive praise from Edgar Schneider himself. In this paper, Tatel provides more evidence of Philippine English entering the fourth stage of Schneider's dynamic model, claiming that the 'complaint tradition' or the widespread sociolinguistic phenomenon where the public expresses its dismay in the apparent decline in language standards (Milroy & Milroy, 2012), is diminishing. He bases this claim through a diachronic investigation of several major Philippine newspapers. The abstract of his paper available below.

The Linguistic Society of the Philippines Outstanding Graduate Paper (LSP-OGP) Award is sponsored by Shirley N. Dita. It seeks to inspire young scholars whose interests are in line with her fields of interest: Philippine languages, World Englishes, and Corpus Linguistics.

One step closer to Phase 4 in Schneider's Dynamic Model

Abstract

This paper examines linguistic insecurity among Filipinos as a formidable hindrance to the progress of Philippine English (PhE) in Schneider’s Dynamic Model. Using Watts’ sociocognitive approach to language, together with Rosenberg and Hovlands’ tripartite model of attitude, the complex connection among language myths in the Philippines, standard-language ideology and prescriptivism, as sources of linguistic insecurity, is unraveled with the aim of showing that PhE is progressing towards endonormative stabilization, albeit slowly and inconspicuously. Moreover, this paper introduces the concept of debate tradition, a counter-discourse to the complaint tradition, and advances that it is a powerful catalyst in the alteration of linguistic prescriptivism. This paper claims that it is necessary to alter the discourse archive of prescriptivism that governs General American English for PhE norm to be completely accepted and adopted by Filipinos. To prove that prescriptivism is diminishing, the change in language attitude towards PhE is shown by comparing the results of early and recent surveys. Finally, a graph is presented that clearly shows the weakening of the complaint tradition, which is a strong indicator of endonormative stabilization, as Schneider has asserted.

Keywords: complaint tradition, Dynamic Model, linguistic insecurity, prescriptivism, standard language ideology