Abstract:

Porohanon (ISO 639-3 prh) spoken in the Municipality of Poro, Camotes, Cebu and Tacloban Waray (ISO 639-3 war) spoken in the Eastern Visayas Region are two members of the Central Bisayan branch of the Bisayan complex (Zorc 1977: 179). Previous descriptions of these speech varieties have tended to classify their common prenominal markers into nominative, genitive, and oblique case forms (“case marking particles” in Zorc’s terminology, p. 229). These forms are also pur-ported to encode distinctions of definite vs. indefinite and specific vs. nonspe-cific; notions which fall under what Balogh et al. (2020: 1) call “nominal anchoring”.

The current study reevaluates the functions of these common prenominal markers using naturalistic speech data from both languages. The syntactic alignments of Porohanon and Tacloban Waray are also reassessed considering more contempo-rary research on ergativity in Philippine languages.