Monday 13 November 2023

Comparing Tagalog And English Person & Number Systems

Martin (2013: 24-5):
Our system network formulation of the revised paradigm is presented below, with PERSON and NUMBER as simultaneous systems, but with a different set of oppositions than those we distinguished when working on the English systems. From this we can see that although English and Tagalog have comparable regions of meaning as far as their pronouns grammar is concerned, no pronoun in one of the two languages can ever be the exact equivalent of a pronoun in the other — because the valeur, to use Saussure's term, is different. The systems are comparable but not equivalent.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Martin's revised paradigm is just Schachter & Otanes' paradigm with different labels:

Martin has replaced Schachter & Otanes' 'non-plural' and 'plural' with Schachter & Otanes' gloss of their own labels, and replaced their formal categories of person with Halliday's functional categories, as previously explained.

[2] This is misleading. Because Martin used formal categories for English and functional categories for Tagalog, the comparability of the meanings is obscured. For example, if English were presented in these functional terms, the only difference between the two would be the absence of the "speaker/addressee" feature in English.


Note that, from an SFL perspective, English does make a distinction in meaning between 'only' and '+others' for 'addressee', it is just that the same form you realises both feature combinations. The distinction in meaning is demonstrated, for example, by the dialectal use of youse and y'all as realisations for the '+others' meaning.

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