A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS ON EXCLAMATIVES IN THE PHILIPPINE

Abstract

Exclamatives constructions in the Philippine English form a variegated class which is often confused with other types of clauses. These structures are characterized by intonation contour, emphatic stress and propositional properties beyond their syntactic form. Using the AntCoc protocol, this corpus-based study presents a survey of the categories and syntactical characteristics as well as the functions of the exclamatives found in ICE-PHI with 199 hits out of 1,172 tokens from the word collection. Key words such as what, how so, such a/an and others were used to locate the target hits of the utterances. Analysis was made on the syntactic and formulaic forms, semantic categories and pragmatic impressions. Results show that 'so' exclamatives posted the highest frequency, followed by the prototypes, and 'the such a/an' exclamatives. Minimal occurrences were recorded for DP – 'the way' exclamatives and nominal exclamatives. A majority of the exclamatives followed the initial exclamative phrase syntactic formula except for the 'such a/an' exclamatives which follow the subject auxiliary inversion. The syntactic features and functions of the exclamatives illustrated the semantic nature of the structures which differentiated them from seeming to be similar structures as in expressive/emotional utterance.