Joohyuk Lim

This paper reports on corpus-based case analyses of 'ba', 'na', and 'pa' when these enclitic particles are inserted in Philippine English texts. The corpus exploration made also furthers on Bautista's (2011) initial investigation of  ''no' in Philippine English, because she has considered the focal word to be a pragmatic particle in the variety of English in the Philippines. The analyses made for this paper were on ICE-PH with the aid of WordSmith Tools 5.0. 'Ba' was shown to alternate with auxiliary inversion in Philippine English yes-no questions and intensify the interrogative force of wh-questions where auxiliary inversions necessarily take place. 'Na' and 'pa' also allow for alternative variants in the expression of various meanings in Philippine English, continuity, recentness, tentativeness, and urgency, among others. Lastly, ''no' was seen to be functioning in place of the very frequent English tag questions in Philippine English, which are morphosyntactically more complicated.

The present analysis places the focus on the morphosyntax of Hong Kong and Indian Eng- lishes, their use of irregular verbs, comparison of adjectives, and s-genitives, and so revisiting the findings of previous studies in light of the contribution of the frequencies for the two new Englishes in question. Hong Kong and Indian Englishes generally follow the British pattern of irregularity, but it is Indian English that is more loyal to its colonial heritage as Hong Kong English has a tendency to demonstrate some ambivalence and indefiniteness in its patterns of verb morphology. As with all the other Englishes investigated in the studies of Hundt (1998) and Borlongan (2011b), Hong Kong and Indian Englishes also inflect for the comparison of adjectives. Periphrastic comparison though is more frequent – but not significantly frequent to put up a new pattern – in Hong Kong and Indian Englishes. The two Englishes also generate much higher frequencies of double comparatives as compared with Philippine and New Zea- land Englishes. Hong Kong and Indian Englishes surface as the most conservative in the use of s-genitives. They are even more conservative than Philippine English, which has always been described as a considerably conservative variety of English.