Does Philippine English subject–verb agreement exist in academic writing? The case of research articles across disciplines

ABSTRACT

Subject–verb agreement is an overlooked grammatical aspect of Philippine English especially in academic registers. This study analyses Philippine English subject–verb agreement in published research articles (RAs) written by Filipino researchers across disciplines. Using Bautista’s subject–verb agreement framework and D’Souza's criteria for linguistic innovation, disciplinary RAs were analyzed through manual coding and independent inter-coding. Being widespread, systematic, rule-governed, and formally and competently used, only the intervening prepositional phrase under verb-related agreement was consistently present across 11 qualitative and quantitative disciplinary RA sub-registers. It appears that this could be an acceptable Philippine English grammatical innovation in academic research writing across disciplines. The study yields implications for Philippine English itself, academic writing instructions, and academic research journals.

KEYWORDS:

• academic writing
• Philippine English
• research articles
• subject–verb agreement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.