A morphosyntactic analysis of the pronominal system of Philippine languages

College

Br. Andrew Gonzalez FSC College of Education

Department/Unit

Dept of English and Applied Linguistics

Document Type

Article

Source Title

PACLIC 24 - Proceedings of the 24th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

First Page

45

Last Page

59

Publication Date

12-1-2010

Abstract

Pronominal orientation is widely argued to be universal component of human languages. Meanwhile, the pronominal system of Philippine languages (henceforth, PL) has always been an obscure subject of investigation. With approximately 150 living languages, the structures of pronominals are just as many. This study attempts to explicate the grammatical functions, along with other known phenomena such as cliticization, homography, inclusivity/exclusivity, person-deixis interface, and hierarchy of some languages in the Philippines. Using an ergative-absolutive analysis, this cross-linguistic investigation of Philippine languages presents examples that illustrate the distinctive features of personal pronouns. Using a 100,000-word corpus for each language included, there are various similarities and differences revealed by the study: (1) some languages allow encliticization and some don't; (2) homography, as well as inclusivity/exclusivity, is a persistent feature of the languages; and (3) the strength of hierarchy poses semantic constraints, among others.

html

Disciplines

Language and Literacy Education

Keywords

Philippine languages—Pronoun; Dumagat language (Casiguran)—Pronoun; Philippine languages—Pronominals; Dumagat language (Casiguran)—Pronominals

Upload File

wf_no

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS