TOWARD A TAXONOMY OF TRAIT ADJECTIVES IN FILIPINO - COMPARING PERSONALITY LEXICONS ACROSS CULTURES

We have developed a comprehensive list of Filipino person descriptive adjectives, organized them into Angleitner, Ostendorf and John's (1990 ) person descriptive categories, obtained college students' (N=1048) t rait prototypicality Judgments, and compared the Filipino trait lexico n to an English trait (Goldberg, 1990) taxonomy based on the Big Five personality domains. Differences in the relative size of different per son descriptive categories were noted between the Filipino and German languages. The Filipino person descriptive lexicon appears to be rough ly comparable in size to the person descriptive or personality relevan t lexicons in the German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Hungarian langua ges, but substantially smaller than the English person descriptive lex icon. Nonetheless, the Filipino trait lexicon makes distinctions compa rable to those encompassed by the English taxonomic categories. As in the English language, the Big Five Agreeableness domain is the most le xically elaborated in Filipino, followed by Surgency and Conscientious ness, Intellect, and Emotional Stability. That is, the largest trait d omains may be those with the most direct interpersonal reference.