Restricted restrictives on Twitter/X: analysing and predicting English relativiser choice in the Philippine Twitter-/X-scape

Previous studies on English in the Philippines (EngPh) have often investigated relativiser choice (e.g., who, that, zero) in restrictive relative clauses (rrc) in popular written and spoken modalities (e.g., student writing and dialogues), highlighting the conditioning effects of a narrow set of modalities on relativiser variation. However, EngPh extends beyond these modalities, presenting a gap in our knowledge: will the distribution of relativiser variants observed in these modalities align with lesser-known ones in EngPh? The extent to which relativiser variation is contributed to by factors beyond those identified in previous research is likewise unknown. Against this backdrop, this paper examines relativiser variation in human-antecedent rrcs on Twitter/X – a digital platform that has hybrid written, spoken, and electronically mediated characteristics. It employs quantitative, computational methods to examine rrcs extracted from the Twitter Corpus of Philippine Englishes (tcope). The findings show notable disparities in the ranking and distribution of relativiser variants between EngPh in speech and on Twitter. Moreover, it was found that within EngPh on Twitter, intra-linguistic, stylistic and extra-linguistic factors jointly restrict or constrain restrictive relativiser choice, with intra-linguistic factors exerting a stronger influence than others. The results provide support for a probabilistic representation of relativiser variation that involves all these factors but assigns greater significance to structural ones.