_edited.png)
Last March 7, 2020, during the Linguistic Society of the Philippines International Conference, Gefilloyd L. De Castro of Zamboanga State College of Marine Sciences and Technology was awarded the 2020 LSP Outstanding Graduate Paper Award with his paper "Investigating cross-linguistic influence in selected pair nouns in Philippine English".
The LSP-OGPA award is made possible through the generosity of Dr. 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.
Read his abstract here:
Language is susceptible to changes especially when it comes in contact with another or other languages; hence, new features may emerge. This study attempted to investigate the cross-linguistic influence of and describe the emerging feature in pair nouns scissors, eyeglasses and pants in Philippine English. The study utilized the Philippine component of the International Corpus English (ICE-Philippines), the Global Web-based English (GloWbE), some spoken conversation from the observation of actual conversation, and L1-English translation task. A total of 274 speakers of different L1 participated in the translation task. This study found out emerging feature in the said pair nouns, that is, they are perceived to be singular in meaning whether or not they are plural in form. This case is evident in the morphosyntactic structure where the nouns are uninflected or, if they are, the singular constituents (e.g. articles a and an, verb is, adjectival number one, demonstrative pronoun this and the pronoun it) are used instead of the plural ones. The emerging feature appears to have been influenced by L1 feature in the process of language production and association. The study posits that the said pair nouns are perceived to be one thing/object which is physically inseparable.