query: aspect and/or tense in tagalog and other Philippine

[Christopher Allen Sundita]

Hi Resty,

I have a question on the terminology. I first encountered the "Begun/Not
Begun" distinction a few years ago in the context of a Cebuano grammar
sketch written by UP Diliman linguist Jessie Grace Rubrico (and then later
on, I saw the terminology in Reid 1992).  But I think this may be actually
irrealis/realis mood. What's your (and others') take on this?

As far as the ambiguity of Tagalog -um- is concerned.  Until the 20th
century, Tagalog had the infix -ungm- which was used for the aspects under
the realis mood, imperfective & perfective. It's a reflex of
Proto-Austronesian *-umin- and there are reflexes of this in other
Philippine languages. My recently-completed undergrad thesis focuses on
this.

--Chris Sundita

On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 3:55 PM, Resty Cena <restycena at gmail.com> wrote:


paradigm is irregular,all other affix voice paradigms are regular and
> comparable. The irregularity ofthe -um-affix stems from the fact that the
> aspect Begun uses it as well(bumili, bumibili), rather than switching to an
> n variant, theway the infinitive of mag-verbs do it, for example, magbili
> becomes nagbiliand nagbibili. But then, -um-cannot use -in- to express
> Begun, for that would be the same form asthe Begun aspects of a patient
> verb. It could have invented *-un-, todistinguish it from -in-, but, I
> guess, it must be thinking, “Well, Ialready have the -um- form, so I’ll just
> use it rather than inventanother infix. That should confuse linguists.”

-- 
Christopher Sundita
Senior, Linguistics
Student Specialist
Monographic Acquisitions, Suzzallo Library
University of Washington, Seattle
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