On the aptative and distributive modes in Kapampangan, a Philippine language KITANO Hiroaki In this paper, I will present some of the findings obtained through a series of fieldwork on Kapampangan, an Austronesian language spoken mainly in Pampanga Province , and in parts of neighboring provinces of Luzon, the Philippines.
Philippine languages (and more generally western Austronesian languages) exhibit a great variety of focus (or simply 'voice') alternations. There has been a large amount of literature in this area.
However, much less attention has been paid to other grammatical categories. In this paper, I will focus on verbal "modes", in particular the "aptative" and distributive" modes.
Rubino (1998) refers to the aptative mode in Tagalog: "Verbs in the aptative mode refer to actions that are nondeliberate, abilitative, or coincidental."
Kapampangan, which is a sister language of Tagalog but nevertheless differ in many respects of grammar, has the aptative mode, which is realized by way of verbal derivation. For actor voice (or morphosyntactically intransitive constructions) , the aptative prefixes are maka-, makapa-, makapag-, or makapaN-, and for undergoer voices (or morphosyntactically transitive constructions) , the prefix is invariant a-.
Mirikitani (1971) mentions only the abilitative meaning of these prefixes: "the term Aptative refers to the possibility that an action will occur, or the ability of someone to perform an action."
In this paper, I will examine aptative transitive predicates with "coincidental" meaning. Among these predicates, we can observe various degree of transitivity. I will discuss aptative constructions along with other seemingly transitive constructions, in terms of transitivity. I will point out that some aptative predicates are far from prototypical as a transitive predicate. The ergative argument is not agent-like, nor is the absolutive argument patient-like. Semantically, there is no action involved, going across from the agent to the patient. There is no patient being affected by an action.
These predicates denote relations, not actions, and therefore they are low in transitivity.
The other mode I will discuss in this paper is the distributive mode. Mithun (1999) mentions that verbal distributives generally spread an event or state over various locations, participants, or occasions. Distributive markers in Kapampangan are again prefixes. I will discuss some basics of the distributive mode in Kapampangan. Finally, I will show how the two modes interact with other grammatical systems, such as pronouns. |