Asian Journal of English Language Studies (AJELS) (Oct 2020)
Code-switching in hugot lines in Philippine movies
Abstract
Hugot lines have become popular among Filipinos nowadays. Cabajar (2016) claims that these lines have emerged because Filipinos are imaginative in playing with language in different forms as evident on how they would include humor in constructing these lines to catch audience’s attention. Azores (2017) defined hugot as ‘pulling out’ and expressing deepest emotions such as happiness, sadness, bitterness, and the like toward something or someone. Given the paucity of studies conducted on this particular genre, this study explored hugot lines in relation to the concept of code-switching (CS) through analyzing their syntactic structures, conversational functions, and motivations. A total of 40 hugot lines were collected from five Philippine movies as corpus of the study. The syntactic patterns were analyzed by examining CS constituents and classifying them based on the Three Types of Code-switching by Poplack (1998) and the Intrasentential Code-switch by Bautista (1998). Conversational functions and motivations for CS were identified based on Gumperz’s (1982) and Tajolosa’s (2013) frameworks, respectively. Results revealed that intrasentential CS was mostly utilized; specifically, nouns and noun phrases were commonly employed at the word and phrase levels, respectively. Personalization was the most commonly used conversational function, and this indicates the closer distance between speakers and addressees as well as the preference for a less formal discourse. Language economy as a common motivation for CS means that speakers employ CS to save time and lessen the effort in the use of language and to be clearer in expressing their feelings, emotions, and opinions through hugot lines.
