The Case-Marking and Classifying Function of Cotabato Manobo Voice Affixes

Abstract

O. Introduction. A very characteristic feature of Philippine languages is a syntactic relationship which has been described in various ways, and in this paper is referred to as the topicvoice relationship1 (McKaughan 1962, Pike 1963). The topic-voice relationship is essentially a clause-level2 (Longacre 1964) feature of independent clauses which have a nuclear predicate manifested by a verb. It may be described as the relationship existing between the predicate verb with its voice affix, and the nominal expression functioning as topic of the clause. This relationship may be subcategorized according to whether the nominal expression is the actor, instrument, object or referent with respect to the predicate verb. The verbal affixes which signal the specific types of relationship in Cotabato Manobo3 are the voice affixes. The nominal expression functioning as topic may be a noun phrase or pronoun. The topic is identified, as in most Philippine languages, by a phrase initial particle if a noun phrase (si with personal names, sa otherwise in Cotabato Manobo), or by the particular form if it is a pronoun. Of the two topic pronoun paradigms (chart 1) the paradigm of short forms takes immediate post verb