Focus and Aspect in Iraya Mangyan Verbs

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to the scarce literature describing the grammar of Iraya Mangyan — a language primarily spoken on the island of Mindoro — by providing a description of how focus and aspect are expressed in the language. Similar to most known Philippine languages, Iraya makes use of affixes that attach to verbs to mark focus. In terms of expressing aspect, the language uses both synthetic and analytic means, and is closely linked to the type of focus affixes that verbs may combine with. When compared to previous descriptions of the verb morphology of the language, the current data seem to indicate that a shift has been occurring in Iraya’s verb focus and aspect paradigms. Differences in the features described might be due to dialectal variations; however, they could also be indicative of attrition in the language as the number of its speakers continue to shrink. A description of the language situation in the area where fieldwork for this study was conducted is also provided.