TITLE:
Morphological and Lexical Variations of Tagalog Nominal and Pronominal Systems in Bataan: Basis for the Development of an Aggregate of Discrete Tagalog Nouns and Pronouns Spoken by Bataeños
AUTHORS:
Lemuel R. Fontillas, Ramon M. Bantugan
KEYWORDS:
Lexical Variations, Morphological Analysis, Tagalog Nominals, Pronominals
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.12 No.8,
August
15,
2024
ABSTRACT: The research project identified and described the lexical and morphological variations of Tagalog nominals and pronominals spoken in the province of Bataan. It further developed an aggregate of these morphologically and lexically distinct nouns and pronouns. The study was conducted in the entire province of Bataan with a total population of 760,650 people based on the 2015 census. A density of 550 inhabitants per square kilometer or 1400 inhabitants per square mile. The survey questionnaire (lexical test) is designed in such a way that the Filipino and/or English versions of the wordlist are given. Items included in the lexical test on nominal types (concrete, abstract state, comitative, reciprocal, instigator, body parts, and other common nominals), and pronominal types (nominals, ordinals, deictics, and demonstratives). The morphological analysis of their lexical test was done manually by the researchers in adherence to the Tagalog reference grammar patterns by Schachter and Otanes. Three (3) inter-raters from each municipality were tapped for the validation of responses. It was concluded that from the corpus that Bataan Tagalog is a variety of the standard Tagalog spoken in the Philippines. The data revealed that the users make use of morphological variations by using compounding or “tambalan” in morphological formation, reduplication or duplication of a morpheme, and using nominalizers. For lexical variations, Bataeños tend to borrow terms that are from the English language. They also consider some lexically free English borrowed morphemes. It was also observed that colonial influences reflect in the lexical variety of the terms. Lastly, morpho phonemics were observed such as Assimilation and Phoneme deletion. The investigation gave more proof that the Bataan Tagalog is a dialect of the standard Tagalog. This is due to the geographical proximity of Bataan to other provinces in Central Luzon who are also Tagalog speakers but have their own Tagalog variety.