Philippine and North Bornean languages: issues in description, subgrouping, and reconstruction

Abstract

The Philippines, northern Sulawesi, and northern Borneo are home to two or three hundred languages that can be described as Philippine-type. In spite of nearly five hundred years of language documentation in the Philippines, and at least a century of work in Borneo and Sulawesi, the majority of these languages remain grossly underdocumented, and an alarming number of languages remain almost completely undocumented. This dissertation reports on the results of a decade of work aiming to address this lack of language documentation, with the author having conducted fieldwork on over three hundred speech varieties throughout most of the Philippines, as well as in northern Sulawesi and northern Borneo. The issues discussed herein are some of those felt to be most important and most relevant: a reanalysis of Maranao phonology; a description of Manide and Inagta Alabat, two previously-undocumented languages that appear to form a primary branch of the Philippine macrogroup; a reanalysis of the subgrouping of the languages of northern Borneo, based on phonological and functor innovations instead of lexicostatistics; a reconsideration of the evidence for the position of Umiray Dumaget; an internal subgrouping of the Subanen languages, and evidence for the integrity of the Subanen subgroup and reconstructions of its protolanguage; a reconstruction of the pronominal systems of the protolanguages ancestral to the Philippine languages and the Southwest Sabah languages; a discussion of the Black Filipino ethnolinguistic groups of the Philippines and their languages; a description of the angry speech register found in many Greater Central Philippine languages; a discussion of the various developments in the verb systems of Philippine-type languages; and an analysis of the data contained in the Spanish-era dictionaries and grammars of various Central Philippine languages.