The Kapampangan Case-Marking System from a Diachronic Perspective

Abstract

This paper presents a detailed description of the morphology involved in the Kapampangan case-marking system, investigating its history through internal reconstruction and cross-linguistic comparison. Eventually, this paper suggests that the traditional paradigm of Philippine case markers is not entirely appropriate for Kapampangan, as this language combines a small number of grammatical markers fairly transparently to cover every syntactic function necessary for an Austronesian-type alignment system, with the help of systematic head marking. The re-analysis presented in the paper raises the question to what degree Kapampangan reduced its case-marking morphology, and to what degree the case-marking system reconstructed for Proto-Philippines, or even Proto-Austronesian, consisted of a smaller number of independent elements that freely combined with each other, rather than a full-fledged paradigm. The Kapampangan system may be a key in the larger question of why Austronesian languages differ so greatly in their case-marking paradigms.