Kagayanen language

Kagayanen is spoken in the following areas: • 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 ==Phonology==

occurs only in loan words, proper names, or in words that have in the cognates of neighboring languages. Outside of loanwords, becomes between vowels. Comparative and historical evidence suggests that and were in complementary distribution before a split occurred likely with pressure from contact with English, Spanish, and Filipino. ranges between and , except in unstressed syllables (as well as before consonant clusters) where it lowers to or . Similarly, lowers to in unstressed syllables, before consonant clusters, and word-finally. It is otherwise . ==Grammar==

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, is a root often used to refer to "cooked rice", but when inflected as a verb, the same root can mean "eat". 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). 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", but linguists use a variety of terms to refer to this type of argument. ==Notes==