A Typology of First Person Dual Pronouns and Their Reconstructibility in Philippine Languages

This paper provides an overview of the distribution of first person dual pronouns in Philippine languages and addresses the issue as to whether or not first person dual pronouns can be reconstructed for the ancestral language of all Philippine languages. Based on data from different microgroups of Philippine languages, the following conclusions are reached. First, no first person dual pronouns can be reconstructed for the parent of the Philippine languages. Second, the wide distribution of first person dual pronouns in different microgroups of Philippine languages is due to drift rather than direct inheritance from the parent of the Philippine languages. 1. INTRODUCTION. (1) In studies on comparative Austronesian linguistics, Proto-Austronesian (PAN) and Proto-Malayo-Polynesian (PMP) are commonly reconstructed as having a pronominal system that makes the following semantic distinctions (Dempwolff 1938, Dahl [1973] 1976, Dyen 1974, Blust 1977, Reid 1999, Ross 2006). First, PAN and PMP personal pronouns distinguished three persons (first, second, and third) and two numbers (singular and plural). Second, first person plural pronouns made a further distinction between inclusive and exclusive forms. When one looks at personal pronoun systems in Philippine languages, a picture somewhat different from that of PAN and PMP arises. More specifically, some Austronesian languages spoken in the Philippines make a four-way (rather than a three-way) distinction in first person pronouns: (i) first person singular ([+speaker, -addressee, -plural]), (ii) first person dual ([+speaker, +addressee, -plural]), (2) (iii) first person plural exclusive ([+speaker, -addressee, +plural]), and (iv) first person plural inclusive ([+speaker, +addressee, + plural]). That is, first person dual (hereafter 1D) forms are found in some Philippine languages but not in PAN and PMP. This raises the question as to whether or not the Philippine languages with 1D forms inherited these forms directly from their common ancestral language. (3) It is the purpose of this paper to address the issue as to whether the occurrence of 1D pronouns in Philippine languages is due to direct inheritance from their ancestral language, parallel independent developments occurring in different Philippine microgroups, (4) or developments under mutual influence. In order to address this question, I first discuss the distribution of 1D pronouns in different microgroups of Philippine languages. Section 3 then deals with the issue as to whether or not 1D pronouns can be reconstructed for the ancestral languages of different Philippine microgroups. Section 4 offers concluding remarks. Data used in this paper are from both published and unpublished materials that are available to me. (5) Sources of data used in this paper are provided in the appendix. 2. THE DISTRIBUTION OF 1D PRONOUNS IN PHILIPPINE LANGUAGES. This section deals with the distribution of 1D pronouns in different Philippine microgroups. Before providing a typology of 1D pronouns in Philippine languages, I first discuss what the term "Philippine languages" refers to and then the classification of Philippine languages. 2.1 PHILIPPINE LANGUAGES AND PHILIPPINE MICROGROUPS. The term "Philippine languages," in a genetic sense, generally refers to Austronesian languages spoken in the Philippine archipelago with the following three exceptions. First, Yami, (6) spoken on Botel Tobago, or Orchid Island (Lanyu in Chinese), off the southeast coast of Taiwan, is considered to be a member of the Bashiic microgroup. Second, the Sangiric, Minahasan, and Gorontalic languages of northern Sulawesi are considered to form the Sangiric microgroup, the Minahasan microgroup, and the Gorontalic subgroup of the Greater Central Philippines microgroup, respectively. Third, Sama-Bajaw or Samalan languages spoken within the Philippines are not considered a part of the Philippine group; instead, they apparently belong to the "Extended Barito Family" of Southeast Borneo (Blust 1991, 2005). …