Inati | Philippine Indigenous Languages Lecture Series

  • Date: 13 Feb 2023 | 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

The second installment of PILLS will feature MA Linguistics alumna, Diane Manzano. In her lecture, Manzano will talk about the verbal clauses of Inati, a Negrito language spoken by the Ati ethnolinguistic group of Panay Island.

 

Registration link: https://bit.ly/PILLS2Reg

 

ABSTRACT:
Inati or Inete is a Negrito language spoken by the Ati ethnolinguistic group of Panay Island. The language is considered an isolate, showing no genetic relation to any other Philippine language (Pennoyer, 1985; Zorc, 1986; Blust, 1991). While most available grammatical descriptions of Inati focus on its diachronic characteristics [e.g., Pennoyer (1985) and Lobel (2013)], this paper will describe some synchronic properties of the language, specifically its verbal system. Inati has three basic types of verbal clauses according to valency: monadic or monovalent, dyadic or divalent, and triadic or trivalent. Nominal markers, along with verbal morphology, are used by speakers to encode syntactic functions of arguments: S, A, O and E (following Dixon, 2010).