A Morphosyntactic Analysis of the Pronominal System of Philippine Languages

A morphosyntactic analysis of the pronominal system of Philippine languages Shirley N. Dita Department of English and Applied Linguistics, De La Salle University, 2401 Taft Avenue, Manila, the Philippines 1004 shirley.dita@dlsu.edu.ph 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. Keywords: pronominals, Philippine language, cliticization, ergative-absolutive, transitivity. 1 Introduction With approximately 150 living languages in the Philippines (Headland, 2003), there are just as many structures of the pronominal system of these languages. The present paper attempts to compare the morphosyntactic features of personal pronouns of ten Philippine languages (henceforth, PL): Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Waray-waray, Kapampangan, Bikol, Pangasinan, Kinaray-a and Ibanag. The first nine are considered major languages, whereas the last is minor. Pronominals are a universal component of human languages and are considered basic vocabulary of any given language. Specifically, personal pronouns are generally closed-class and are unaffected by borrowing or code-switching. With these, it is hoped that a careful analysis of their features will shed light to the many controversies concerning PL (cf. Himmelman, 1991). Literature suggests that there is an obvious paucity of studies on the pronominal systems of PL. Early studies (Reid, 1975; Tharp, 1974) have dealt more with the reconstruction of prototypes and a few looked into deictics (e.g., MacFarland, 2006). It is this gap that the present research aims to address. 1.1 Ergative-absolutive analysis In most languages like Indo-European, the nominative-accusative distinction is used. About a quarter of the world’s languages, however, have a unique case-marking called ergative- absolutive (Dixon, 1993). Among these languages are Dyirbal (cf. Dixon, 1972) and Basque, PACLIC 24 Proceedings 45 among others. There had been varied analyses for PL over the years. Bloomfield’s (1917) work on Tagalog utilized the nominative-accusative distinction and has then dominated the literature on PL for quite some time. The ergative-absolutive analysis came about in the 80s with the works of Payne (1982), Starosa (1986), Gerdts (1988), to name a few. Other analyses have also emerged: the active-stative analysis (Drossard, 1994); the fluid voice analysis (Shibatani, 1999); the hybrid analysis (Machlachlan 1996), and the precategorial symmetrical voice analysis (Foley, 1998). This paper maintains that PL can be best analyzed using an ergative-absolutive distinction. The ergative-absolutive language (or simply ergative language) treats the object …

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