Yakan, a member of the Sama-Badjaw subgroup
of the Malayo-Polynesian family of Austronesian languages,
is spoken by about 100,000 people on Basilan Island and
nearby areas in the southern Philippines. It is a
morphologically ergative language that displays a
significant degree of syntactic ergativity. This is the
first detailed description of its grammar.
Chapter 1 presents a brief sociolinguistic description of
the Yakan people. Chapter 2 describes the phonology of the
language. Chapter 3 treats parts of speech. Chapter 4
presents an overview of noun phrases. Chapter 5 describes
case marking. Chapter 6 discusses a unique feature of
Yakan, the clitic -in which occurs on NPs and
signals either definiteness or syntactic requiredness.
Chapter 7 contains a comprehensive analysis
of thirteen semantic verb classes and their affixes.
Chapter 8 discusses verbal morphology, including the suffix
-an which functions as a verb classifier, a
valence increaser, and an indicator of partial
affectedness. Chapter 9 describes nonverbal and verbal
clause types. Chapter 10 reviews negation. Chapter 11
covers second-position clitics. Chapter 12, 13, and 14
present tense, aspect, and mood respectively.
Chapter 15 discusses a range of syntactic
processes, including promotion to direct object,
passivization, antipassivization, equi-NP deletion,
raising, relativization, clefting, reflexivization,
reciprocal action, and a unique process in which the
syntactic relation of oblique NPs is altered without
involving full promotion to direct object.
Chapter 16 treats complex sentences,
including complement clause constructions, serial verb
constructions, coordinate clause constructions, and
subordinate clause constructions. Chapter 17 covers
causative constructions. A narrative text illustrating some
of these linguistic features is also included.
A companion volume to the Yakan-English Dictionary
(Behrens 2002) and Yakan Texts (Brainard &
Behrens 2007), also available from this outlet.
xiii, 221pp. ISBN: 971-780-012-X (Linguistic Society of the
Philippines Special Monograph Issue, 40:1)
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