The Philippine Islands, with a population of over ninety-seven million is comprised of seven thousand one hundred seventy islands with residents speaking seven hundred different dialects. Prominent among all the dialects are the Tagalog and Cebuano, widely spoken in many places in the archipelago. Tagalog, being renamed as Filipino, officially became the national language. Although considered as the designated national language known as the Filipino language, Tagalog originally was spoken only in the capital city, Manila compared to Cebuano which is widely spoken in the Visayas and Mindanao. Neighboring provinces in Luzon have their own spoken dialect such as Ilocano in the Ilocos region (northern Luzon), Bicolano in the Bicol region (lower eastern Luzon), Pampangueno in the central plain region, Caviteno in the lower western Region, and Tagalog in the lower southern region. The Cebuano dialect is spoken and understood in the Visayas and Mindanao regions in spite of their local dialects. There are also Cebuano speaking families living in some parts of Luzon. The Ilonggo in western Visayas, Waray in Samar and Leyte in eastern Visayas, and Boholano for people in Bohol in the southern Visayas are regional dialects, but these dialects have only minor deviations from the Cebuano dialect. People who speak the Cebuano dialect are called Bisaya even if they are living outside of the Cebu Province, as they comprise and represent the Visayas region. Where majority of the residents in the Mindanao region are from the Visayas, hence they are also called Bisaya.

Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Change focuses on the influence of sociocultural terms on the forms of languages. The selection first underscores the sociocultural dimensions of language change and language evolution and speech style. Discussions focus on the relation of speech style and language evolution, linguistic evidence of language evolution, autonomy of code and style, language contact phenomena, and extension of the concept of language. The book then takes a look at speech and social prestige in the Belizian speech community; Japanese numeral classifiers; and speculations on the growth of ethnobotanical nomenclature. Topics include appearance of varietal names, differentiation and formation of specific names, six universal categories of ethnobotanical nomenclature, salience of speech, and prestige, social success, and language. The publication elaborates on color categorization in West Futunese; creolization and syntactic change in New Guinea Tok Pisin; relexification processes in Philippine Creole Spanish; and the historical and sociocultural aspects of the distribution of linguistic variants in highland Chiapas, Mexico. The selection is a valuable source of data for language experts and researchers interested in the sociocultural dimensions of language change.

Over the last twenty years or so, most of the work on the syntax of Philippine languages has been focused on the question of whether or not these languages can be said to have grammatical subjects, and if so which argument of a basic transitive clause should be analysed as being the subject. Paul Kroeger's contribution to this debate asserts that grammatical relations such as subject and object are syntactic notions, and must be identified on the basis of syntactic properties, rather than by semantic roles or discourse functions. A large number of syntactic processes in Tagalog uniquely select the argument which bears the nominative case. On the other hand, the data which have been used in the debate to assert the ambiguity of subjecthood are best analysed in terms of semantic rather than syntactic constraints. Together these facts support an analysis that takes the nominative argument as the subject. Kroeger examines the history of the subjecthood debate and uses data from Tagalog to test the theories that have been put forth. His conclusions entail consequences for certain linguistic concepts and theories, and lead Kroeger to assert that grammatical relations are not defined in terms of surface phrase structure configurations, contrary to the assumptions of many approaches to syntax including the Government-Binding theory. Paul Kroeger is presently doing fieldwork in Austronesian languages and teaching linguistics to fieldworkers from around the world.

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