Pronouns The following set of pronouns are the pronouns found in the Palauan language:
Noun inflection Palauan nouns inflect based on humanness and number via the plural prefix , which attaches to plural human nouns (see ). For example, the word 'person' is a human noun that is unambiguously singular, whereas the noun people is a human noun that is unambiguously plural. Non-human nouns do not display this distinction, e.g., the word for 'stone', , can denote either a singular 'stone' or multiple 'stones.' Some possessed nouns in Palauan also inflect to agree with the person, number, and humanness of their possessors. For example, the unpossessed noun means simply 'table,' whereas one of its possessed forms means 'my table.' Possessor agreement is always registered via the addition of a suffix to the noun (also triggering a shift in stress to the suffix). The possessor agreement suffixes have many different irregular forms that only attach to particular nouns, and they must be memorized on a noun-by-noun basis . However, there is a "default" e-set suffixes (see and ), shown below: There are some morphophonological changes, often unpredictable, including: • Single vowels are reduced to , written as ( → 'my stone'), or being syncopated entirely ( → 'my fish'), with few nouns not reducing their vowel ( → 'my hand') • Double vowels are reduced to single vowels ( → 'my nail'), sometimes reduced further to ( → ) or even syncopated • Due to syncopation, numerous complicated consonant clusters are produced, and some of them are simplified in Palauan ( → 'my water', → 'my breast')
Verb inflection Palauan verb morphology is highly complex. 'eat', for example, may be analyzed as verb prefix + imperfective + , in which is an archimorpheme that is only apparent from comparing various forms, e.g. 'food' and taking into consideration morphophonemic patterns: 'the dog was eating fish' (lit. it VERB PREFIX-m eat-PAST INFIX-il- ARTICLE fish ARTICLE dog); 'The dog eats up fish' (lit. it-eat-PERFECTIVE-INFIX-m- fish ARTICLE dog). The verb system points to fossilized forms related to the Philippine languages.
Word order The
word order of Palauan is usually thought to be
verb–object–subject (VOS), but this has been a matter of some debate in the linguistic literature. Those who accept the VOS analysis of Palauan word order generally treat Palauan as a
pro-drop language with preverbal
subject agreement morphemes, final pronominal subjects are deleted (or
null). Example 1: . (means: 'I was eating the apple.') In the preceding example, the abstract null pronoun is the subject 'I,' while the clause-initial is the first person singular subject agreement morpheme. On the other hand, those who have analyzed Palauan as SVO necessarily reject the pro-drop analysis, instead analyzing the subject agreement morphemes as subject pronouns. In the preceding example, SVO-advocates assume that there is no
pro and that the morpheme is simply an overt subject pronoun meaning 'I'. One potential problem with this analysis is that it fails to explain why overt (3rd person) subjects occur clause-finally in the presence of a co-referring 3rd person "subject pronoun" --- treating the subject pronouns as agreement morphemes circumvents this weakness. Consider the following example. Example 2: . (means: 'Satsuko was eating the apple.') Proponents of the SVO analysis must assume a shifting of the subject 'Satsuko' from clause-initial to clause-final position, a movement operation that has not received acceptance cross-linguistically, but see for discussion. ==Palauan phrases==