The variations of English adjective phrase use among bloggers from two Myanmar ethnic groups

Abstract

Blogs have become an undeniably important source of information in socio-political occurrences in Myanmar, especially concerning the conditions of its minorities including the Rohingyas. However, Myanmar bloggers are non-native speakers of English and their mother tongues belong to different language families of unique historical backgrounds. These differences may have significant effects on the English language production of the bloggers. This study specifically explores variations of adjective phrases used by Burmese and Rohingya bloggers. Adjectival modifiers are very important in the content of blogs as they are linguistically instrumental in the narrations, descriptions and analyses of incidents and issues. Adjective phrases collected from forty blog articles have been thoroughly analysed. The findings of this have theoretical and pedagogical implications. Among others, it can be concluded that adjective phrases with adverb modifiers is the form most frequently used by both Rohingya and Burmese bloggers. However, Burmese bloggers use more varieties of adverb modifiers than Rohingya bloggers. The latter, on the other hand, have been found to considerably use more complements with different prepositional phrases. In terms of functions, both Rohingya and Burmese bloggers used adjective phrases for functions to describe qualification and human propensity. However, while Rohingya bloggers used various adjective phrases to describe these functions, it has been found that Burmese bloggers used only complements for these purposes which could be the result of native language influence, as these functions are usually performed by verbs in the Burmese language.