Philippine E-Journals

Directives: Business Transactions in Philippine English

Carissa Anna Cariño

Discipline: English, Languages

 

Abstract:

Studies in World Englishes have explored speech acts in different language communities. This study describes how speakers of Philippine English (PE) use directives in business transactions. Transcribed conversations from the Spoken Text category of the International Corpus of English, Philippines Component (ICE-PHI) gathered by Bautista, Lising, and Dayag (2004) had been analyzed, revealing patterns with which native speakers of PE use business when conducting business transactions. This analysis reveals that over 70% of the occurrences of directives in PE business transaction conversations were executed in forms of imperatives, avoiding misinterpretation. Although the lack of attempts to mitigate utterances in most imperatives appear to be face-threatening, findings of this study suggest that particular formulas may also allow such directives to employ face-saving strategies,