Abstract:

The Iraya Mangyans form one of the eight indigenous ethnolinguistic groups on the island of Mindoro, which is located off the southwestern coast of Luzon. This thesis presents a description of the grammar of the language spoken by the Iraya Mangyans, particularly in the northwestern part of Oriental Mindoro.

There have been few studies on the Iraya Mangyan language, and most of the linguistic studies, which do include this language, deal with its genetic relationship with other Mangyan languages and with other Philippine languages (Zorc, 1974; Barbian, 1977; and Reid, 2017). To date, the most extensive description of the language was made by Tweddell (1958), however, it is only limited to the description of Iraya phonology and morphology.

This study seeks to present a more comprehensive grammar of the language by revisiting the phonological and morphological structure of the language, and by describing the syntactic patterns and operations in Iraya. Some of the noteworthy features of the language include the lack of case markers, the lack of distinction between dual and plural personal pronouns in terms of case, the use of grammaticalized gender markers, and the limited productivity of aspectual marking on verbs through affixation. There is also no overt relativizing morpheme in the language, and the relative clause is simply juxtaposed to the head noun that it modifies.

As with most Philippine languages, Iraya is a primarily predicate-initial language. However, in cases where the actor is encoded as a personal pronoun, there is a strong preference for it to appear in the pre-verbal position.

Word order is relatively strict in this language. The grammatical relations of arguments can be discerned from the semantic roles they play within the sentence, their position within the sentence, and the focus affix attached to the verb. The strict word order in the language is hypothesized to be due to the lack of differentiation in the case marking of core arguments within the sentence.

This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the language and provides an overview of the language situation of the Iraya Mangyans of Oriental Mindoro. Chapter 2 provides a review of previous studies on this language, with particular attention paid to Tweddell’s description of Iraya phonology and morphology. Chapter 3 introduces the phonemic inventory of the language and the morphophonological processes that occur in the language. Chapter 4 presents the categorization of morphemes and the various word formation processes in Iraya.  Specific grammatical categories such as the case, number, and gender of nouns, as well as aspect, focus, and modality of verbs are discussed in this chapter as well. Chapter 5 presents the phrasal and clausal structures in Iraya. Syntactic operations such as coordination and subordination are also discussed. Finally, Chapter 6 presents a summary and implications of the current findings, as well as recommendations for future studies on the language.