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Kagayanen language
The Kagayanen language is spoken in the province of Palawan in the Philippines. It belongs to the Manobo subgroup of the Austronesian language family and is the only member of this subgroup that is not spoken on Mindanao or nearby islands. DistributionKagayanen is spoken in the following areas:[2]
Phonology
[h] occurs only in loan words, proper names, or in words that have [h] in the cognates of neighboring languages.[4] Outside of loanwords, /d/ becomes [r] between vowels.[5] Comparative and historical evidence suggests that /ð̞/ and /l/ were in complementary distribution before a split occurred likely with pressure from contact with English, Spanish, and Tagalog.[6]
/i/ ranges between [i] and [e], except in unstressed syllables (as well as before consonant clusters) where it lowers to [ɪ] or [ɛ].[8] Similarly, /u/ lowers to [ʊ] in unstressed syllables, before consonant clusters, and word-finally. It is otherwise [u].[9] GrammarMost roots in Kagayanen do not have a defined part of speech but can function in predication (like verbs), referring (like nouns), or modifying (like adjectives and adverbs). For example, kaan is a root often used to refer to "cooked rice", but when inflected as a verb, the same root can mean "eat".[10] Verbs are inflected for mood, volition, voice (transitive/intransitive in Pebley's terminology), and whether the absolutive argument is a typical affected patient (applicative marking).[11] As with other Austronesian languages, one argument of a verb is always treated specially by the syntax. Pebley refers to this unmarked noun phrase (which is often but not always in a patient role when another argument is present) simply as the "absolutive" argument. (Van Valin 2005) refers to this as the PSA, the "privileged syntactic argument",[12] but linguists use a variety of terms to refer to this type of argument. Notes
References
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