Stylistic shifts in the English of the Philippine print media

Abstract

Background Philippine English, as one of the New Englishes, has been carefully studied in terms of its structural features (Llamzon 1969; Alberca 1978; Gonzalez and Alberca 1978). Llamzon studied oral and written varieties, while Alberca concentrated on oral and written varieties in the mass media, using data from radio and TV and from print (newspapers and weekly periodicals). Llamzon compared different styles of oral English (formal, i.e., the equivalent of a formal reading style; and informal); so did Alberca in drawing a distinction between newscasts and talk-shows on TV as oral varieties, and between different journalistic styles as written varieties. Newscasts were considered to be formal oral varieties (equivalent to careful reading style) and talk-shows to be informal oral varieties. Of the written varieties, news stories were considered to be formal varieties, whereas feature articles and columns were considered to be informal varieties. In these seminal works on style, some attempt was made at frequency counts of the incidence of certain features, to demonstrate stylistic differences empirically. Subsequently, Gonzalez (1982) reported a more careful study of style, pointing out qualitative differences and using examples from different types of journalistic writing.

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