Honeylet Dumoran publishes paper on trends in Philippine linguistics research

The PJL @ 50: Themes and Perspectives in Philippine Linguistics Research (1970-2017)

This paper reviews the trends in themes and perspectives that are explored in the papers published in the Philippine Journal of Linguistics (PJL) from its first decade to its fifth (Volumes 1-48). This paper classifies themes according to the goals of the research, which may be one of several types of grammatical descriptions and language analyses. Perspective is used in this paper to refer to the philosophical preoccupation that the studies carry, manifested in both theoretical and methodological approaches that are used in the treatment and analyses of their corpora. Examining 435 published research articles from the PJL, this review is done by mapping these trends in themes and perspectives against the points raised in two state of the art papers: (1) Reid’s Philippine Linguistics: State of the Art—1970-1980, which described how the field has developed within the ten-year scope; and (2) Liao’s Philippine linguistics: The state-of-the-art 1981-2005. Trends in (a) paper type, (b) research methodology, (c) corpora, (d) subject matter, (e) language/language varieties studied, and (f) authorship are compared across the five decades. In summarizing what has been studied and published in the Journal, and in identifying which areas in the discipline remains under-researched, the paper reveals the extent of the direction towards which Philippine language scholarship has developed, and presents insights into the determination of a trajectory for Philippine linguistics and language studies in the country.