Word Formation Processes in Masbatenyo

Word Formation Processes in Masbatenyo Romualdo A. Mabuan Far Eastern University Manila, Philippines rmabuan@feu.edu.ph Shirley N. Dita De La Salle University Manila, Philippines shirley.dita@dlsu.edu.ph Michael C. Tanangkingsing National Taipei University of Technology Taipei, Taiwan miguelntut@gmail.com Abstract Masbatenyo (also called Masbateño or Minasbate; ISO 639-3 identifier msb) refers to the language spoken in the island province of Masbate in Bicol Region, the Philippines. This paper is drawn from an endogenous ethnographic study conducted by the lead author which utilized a 400,000- word corpora from written, actual spoken, and narrative data gathered from 2017-2019 in the province of Masbate. Specifically, this presentation focuses on Masbatenyo’s word formation processes, which include the following: stem-based affixation (stem- forming affixes ka-, pag-, taga-/paga-, paN- , paka-, pakig-), compounding (endocentric, exocentric, synthetic, copulative), reduplication (nouns, adjectives, verbs, other lexical categories), and prefixation (uru-, Curu-). Pedagogical implications particularly in the teaching of Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) are provided in light of the findings of this study. 1 Introduction Aimed at contributing to the Philippine linguistic ecology particularly in the dearth of local literature, this study has been conducted to document the Masbatenyo language, which is a language spoken in the island province of Masbate in the Bicol Region, Philippines. Eberhard et al. (2022) classifies Masbatenyo as Austronesian, Malayo-Polynesian, Greater Central Philippines, Central Philippines, Bisayan, Central, Peripheral. It also rates Masbatenyo’s language status as 3 (Wider communication) based on EGIDS or Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale, which means that it is a language used for wider communication at various domains such as home, work, and market. Situated at the center of the Philippine archipelago and at the linguistic crossroads of surrounding islands of Bicol, Southern Tagalog, Romblon, Panay, Cebu, and Samar-Leyte, Masbate is a melting pot of dialects and cultures, making it a plurilingual/multilingual province with diverse tongues and competing grammatical systems. 2 Method This study adopted an endogenous ethnographic study (Ginkel, 1994), which is a type of ethnography that allows a researcher to examine their own culture using an insider lens. With this approach, the primary author, as an endo-ethnographer who is a Masbatenyo native speaker, is put in a privileged position because of his a priori intimate knowledge and comprehensive view of my own culture and society. Following the tenets of ethnographic research, this approach requires methods such as field work, participant observation, interview, and examination of materials, texts, or artifacts to obtain data. Recording occurred in multiple narrative, text, voice, and video formats (DePoy & Gitlin, 2016). This paper has adapted theoretical frameworks as described in the syntactic typology of Philippine languages (Reid & Liao, 2004) and the Philippine transitivity and ergativity (Payne, 1982). Other frameworks on phonology and morphosyntactic principles helped facilitate the analysis and understanding of the morphosyntax of Masbatenyo, and these include morphosyntax (Payne, 1997), clause types Dixon and Aikhenvald’s (2000), and morphosyntactic studies on Philippine languages such as nominals and noun markers (Dita, 2007), and clitics (Tanangkingsing, 2017). 3 Findings 3.1 Masbatenyo Word Formation Processes While the authors posit that …

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