Congratulations to Assistant Professor Kristina Gallego on the publication of her study titled “The Structural Consequences of Lexical Transfer in Ibatan” in the book “Traces of Contact in the Lexicon: Austronesian and Papuan Studies,” edited by Marian Klamer and Francesca Moro! The newly-published volume, which is part of the Brill Studies in Language Contact and the Dynamics of Language series, includes other studies by an international group of scholars who explored the effects of language contact in different regions within the Philippines, Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and New Guinea.
Below is the abstract of Dr. Gallego’s study:
The Structural Consequences of Lexical Transfer in Ibatan
This paper investigates the development of a particular contact-induced change in the voice morphology of Ibatan, an Austronesian language spoken on the island community of Babuyan Claro in the far north of the Philippines. Given its close history with the Ilokano language, Ibatan has developed parallel paradigms for actor voice durative verbs, namely the native paradigm pay-, and the non-native paradigm pag-, which developed mainly through large-scale lexical transfer. Generally, the non-native paradigm occurs with non-native stems, forming complex loanwords, whereas the native paradigm typically occurs with native stems. However, there are also cases of hybrid formations, which involve combinations of native and non-native materials. The patterns in the distribution of the parallel paradigms reflect layers of contact-induced language change, which are driven by different agents with varying degrees of psycholinguistic dominance in Ibatan, and these are argued to be underpinned by the changing social landscape of the Babuyan Claro community.
The book is open-access and may be read and downloaded through this link.
Pagbati, Dr. Gallego!
Published by UP Department of Linguistics
