Kagayanen language

Kagayanen is spoken in the following areas:^[2]

• Palawan Province: Cagayancillo Island between Negros and Palawan
• Palawan coastal communities
• southern Palawan: Balabac Island
• northern Palawan: Busuanga and Coron
• other areas around the Philippines: Iloilo Province; Silay, Negros; Manila; Quezon and Rizal areas

[h] occurs only in loan words, proper names, or in words that have [h] in the cognates of neighboring languages.^[4] Outside of loanwords, /d/ becomes [r] between vowels.^[5]

Comparative and historical evidence suggests that /ð̞/ and /l/ were in complementary distribution before a split occurred likely with pressure from contact with English, Spanish, and Filipino.^[6]

/i/ ranges between [i] and [e], except in unstressed syllables (as well as before consonant clusters) where it lowers to [ɪ] or [ɛ].^[8] Similarly, /u/ lowers to [ʊ] in unstressed syllables, before consonant clusters, and word-finally. It is otherwise [u].^[9]

Most roots in Kagayanen do not have a defined part of speech but can function in predication (like verbs), referring (like nouns), or modifying (like adjectives and adverbs). For example, kaan is a root often used to refer to "cooked rice", but when inflected as a verb, the same root can mean "eat".^[10] Verbs are inflected for mood, volition, voice (transitive/intransitive in Pebley's terminology), and whether the absolutive argument is a typical affected patient (applicative marking).^[11] As with other Austronesian languages, one argument of a verb is always treated specially by the syntax. Pebley refers to this unmarked noun phrase (which is often but not always in a patient role when another argument is present) simply as the "absolutive" argument. (Van Valin 2005) refers to this as the PSA, the "privileged syntactic argument",^[12] but linguists use a variety of terms to refer to this type of argument.