Pagtuki sa Binalaybay: A Stylistic Analysis of Sebuano Figurative Language in Iligan National Writers Workshop’s Sebuano Poems

Abstract

The place of poetry in Sebuano culture is central. Yet, no adequate compendium of poetry in Sebuano exists despite the abundant number of figurative expressions present in Sebuano, an Austronesian language spoken as a native language by a majority of the people in the Philippines. This study intends to discover which expressions in Sebuano poems are figurative through markers that indicate a nonliteral interpretation, and which traditionally-introduced categories are most commonly used among these expressions found in Sebuano poetry. The corpus of this paper are Sebuano poems found in the Poetry section of Volumes 1 to 20 (1994 to 2013) proceedings of the Iligan National Writers Workshop, a pioneering literary development in Mindanao after the two leading workshops in the country, namely that of University of the Philippines and Silliman. The data was analyzed in terms of (a) Levin’s linguistic deviation (b) McArthur and Perrine’s markers of figurativeness and (c) categorization and characterization of figurative language. The study found that while there are those expressions that fall under the categories namely: metaphor, personification, simile, hyperbole, onomatopoeia, and synecdoche; there are, however, recurring patterns of Sebuano figurative expressions that defy categorization and are referred to by the researchers as ‘Emerging Sebuano Figurative Language Categories.’ This paper explores the depths and complexities of Sebuano figurative language and presents these findings as a preliminary description of Sebuano figurative language.