Openings of telephone conversations in Philippine English

This study provides a corpus-based description of telephone-conversation openings in Philippine English. Data for the analysis of telephone conversations in Philippine English come from the Philippine component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-PH) to be more specific, this study makes use of the telephone calls documented in the dialogic, spoken texts in ICE-PH coded as S1A-091 to S1A-100. The analysis of a rather limited sample from ICE-PH—ten samples, to be specific—reveals interesting insights with regard to how similar or different openings in telephone conversations are in Philippine English with reference to American English. The sequences employed or afforded by Filipino speakers of English in telephone conversations appear to be rather tentatively established thus far. The openings documented in ICE-PH range from strict observants of Schegloff’s (1972, 1979, 1986) four core opening sequences in American English to complete deviations from the purported patterns in the superstrate variety.