Inclusory Constructions and Their Development in Philippine Languages

Abstract

In many Philippine languages it is possible to express plural participants in an activity by conjoining two or more noun phrases with the same case-marking. In Tagalog (Schachter and Otanes 1972:115‒116), for example, the conjunction at ‘and’ conjoins NPs that express nominative (common) nouns, as in (1a), while it conjoins NPs that express genitive and locative (personal) nouns, as in (1b-c), respectively. The second NP in such coordinate constructions may or may not be required to be preceded by a nominal specifier marking case and/or the semantic features of the following noun, as in (1)a, in which the form marking the following noun as a common noun is optional. Similar constructions occur widely in Philippine languages, as exemplified also in Masbatenyo, and in Khinina-ang Bontok.