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DISCOURSE MARKERS IN CONTACT: INVESTIGATING 'LIKE' AND 'PARANG' IN TAGALOG-ENGLISH BILINGUAL SPEECH

Linguistics Special Lecture Series (LSLS) 2025 No. 7
10 September | Wednesday | 2:30 PM
CSSP Health and Wellness Center
The Linguistics Special Lecture Series (LSLS) features talks by invited experts on various topics under the fields of theoretical and applied linguistics. For this sixth installment, visiting research fellow Patricia Camus, PhD student at Université Paris Cité, gave a talk on discourse markers in contact.

ABSTRACT
This study investigates the discourse markers (DMs) ‘like’ and ‘parang’ in Tagalog-English bilingual speech. Although both markers have been previously described in monolingual contexts, their role and behavior in bilingual discourse remains largely unexplored. Drawing on a corpus of interviews of 15 Filipino bilinguals, this project examines the DMs’ clausal positions, discourse functions, and distribution across language contexts. Using quantitative modeling alongside qualitative analysis, we will see how these markers align or diverge from each other. Furthermore, we will also see whether ‘like’ functions as a borrowed element or whether it continues to operate as a code-switched item. The talk will present preliminary insights from this analysis, reflect on what they suggest about the current state of discourse marking in Tagalog-English speech, and invite discussion on their broader implications for language contact and bilingual communication.

BIONOTE
Patricia Camus is a doctoral student in Linguistics at Université Paris Cité. She obtained a BA in Linguistics at the University of the Philippines Diliman and an MA in Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics at Université Paris Cité. Her previous work includes the documentation and description of Philippine languages, research on discourse markers and pragmatic particles, as well as the analysis of some linguistic and paralinguistic indicators of personality. She is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the UP Department of Linguistics, where she is developing a spoken corpus for Tagalog to support her doctoral research on discourse markers.