MA student Rolien Mark Balisi won the Outstanding Graduate Paper Award with his paper, “An Ethnolinguistic Exploration of the word mukha from Metaphorical, Metonymic, and Cultural Perspectives,” at the 5th Linguistic Society of the Philippines International Conference (LSPIC) held last April 27-29 at Mindanao State University – Iligan Institute of Technology.

This year’s LSPIC had the theme of “Decentering, Decolonizing, and Deconstructing Languages in New Paradigms and Discourses.” Language researchers and instructors from all the world reflected on and evaluated existing linguistic theories and methodologies, and aimed to “reexamine our research practices involving language, in order to distill existing paradigms into—if not create—frameworks that are more responsive to our local and multilingual contexts.” Members of the faculty, along with undergraduate and graduate students of the Department, presented their papers at the conference. 

Balisi’s work explored the Tagalog work mukha by looking at its metaphorical and metonymic uses in oral and written speech. Below is its abstract of his presentation.

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An Ethnolinguistic Exploration of the Word mukha from Metaphorical, Metonymic, and
Cultural Perspectives

This paper explores how the word Tagalog word mukha ‘face’ is used by speakers from metaphorical and metonymic perspectives. Data from prominent newspapers and tabloid articles which used mukha metaphorically and metonymically were collected and were classified based on how mukha was used, and how the mukha metaphor relates to the Tagalog concept of hiya ‘shame’. Using the University of Leipzig 2019 and 2020 Tagalog news corpora, forty-three (43) metaphoric usages of mukha were identified, which were further classified into six (6) types of metaphors and one type of metonymic usage. The findings of this study aims contributes to our understanding of Philippine culture and language history and also to shed light on how we perceive our individual and collective realities.

The LSP Outstanding Graduate Paper Award “seeks to inspire young scholars whose interests are in line with her fields of interest: Philippine languages, World Englishes, and Corpus Linguistics.” The winner is chosen based on its relevance to Philippine linguistics, originality, soundness of argument, and writing style. 

Congratulations, Rolien!

Published by John Michael de Pano