Sana'y Maulit Muli: The Grammar of Agency and Emotion in a
Tagalog Transnational Cinematic Melodrama
Gary B. Palmer (Nevada, Las Vegas)
March 9, 1999
This paper is about the confluence of Tagalog grammar with culture-history.1 It examines usages of the language of experience within a complex cultural and historical formation. By "language of experience", I mean language describing emotions, sensations, and thoughts or cognitions.2 The historical formation is the Filipino diaspora and the transnational community that it has produced, as seen in a popular film Sana'y Maulit Muli 'Hope for Renewal'. The story was viewed on videotape in Las Vegas and selected passages were translated with the assistance of two Filipino consultants, a young man and woman, both near the apparent ages of the protagonists in the film.3
Specifically, I will show that characters in the film represent their perceived options for action by their choice of verbal constructions in emotional language. Tagalog verb affixes on appropriate stems permit speakers to represent focal participants as passive experiencers or as active controllers of events. The voicing affixes that occur in the emotional language of Sana'y include -um-, ma-, na-, mag-, nag-, -in- and -in.
The plot is a drama of the genre that the male consultant on this project refers to somewhat distainfully as masyadong madrama 'excessively dramatic'. It portrays characters talking about their thoughts and emotions while living and working in Manila and San Francisco. The locations and occupations shown in the film reflect the 20th Century history of United States policy towards the Philippines, one of military subjugation followed by a post World War II period of support for neocolonial governance. While Sana'y contains criticisms of unbridled capitalism and depictions of the painful experiences of Filipinos working in the U.S. economy, it does not appear to be intended as political or economic criticism. In fact, it can be taken as a case study of the process by which symbols and values of the market economy circulate for general consumption. Analysis of the language of experience in the film reveals how emotions are verbally constructed by some Filipinos and how these constructions relate to situations arising out of Filipino culture-history.
There are two reasons why the language of experience must be situated in culture-history. The first (and for this paper, most important) reason is because meanings are generated by discourses. Speech acquires meanings on the fly as senses of conventional options in lexicon and grammar are compared to emerging situations, none of which exactly matches any preceding events. Emerging situations acquire their significances when assimilated to the categories offered up by culture-history and language. Emerging situations instantiate these conventional categories and stretch their boundaries in new directions. Thus, expressions simultaneously evoke widely known scenarios and expand them to encompass novel events. To cite one example, experiences and scenarios arising out of a history of exploitation must evoke the formation of a grammar and lexicon of suffering, resentment, hope, and volition. The latter two, hope and volition, pertain to the topic of personal agency, which is a preoccupation of contemporary anthropological theory.
The task of the ethnographer is to provide thick descriptions of the contexts of usage. But for the purpose of linguistic analysis, context must be carefully defined. It is not enough to define it as the situation or setting, because that leaves unanswered the question of "situation or setting according to whom". I define context as those culturally defined scenarios in which linguistic expressions are used. Context is defined by the interlocutors. Context is provided by the imagination operating within a cultural tradition. This is the premise of my book Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics (1996).
If we understand conventional cultural contexts, then we are prepared to understand how instances of subjective usage call forth characters defined by social statuses, much like a game of Dungeons and Dragons. We discover how usages negotiate identities of persons and groups. And we see how usages evoke scenarios of cooperation and resistance, as described, for example, by Gumperz (1966). We can understand when choices are made between constructions that are conventional or novel, sanctioned or counter-cultural.
The perspective of cultural linguistics reveals some points of difficulty that require attention to methods. One difficulty comes in defining culture-historically based scenarios with sufficient clarity to reveal the purposes that language serves. Another comes in discovering how speakers and hearers are defining those scenarios and applying them to their own lives. These are not always easy things to do. These problems are compounded by the fact that context includes not only the immediately preceding discourse and the ongoing impinging social events, but also the culture-history that gives those events a more general significance. Contexts are nested, so that emergent discourse occurs within ongoing impinging social events, which themselves occur within cultural and historical events unfolding over decades or even centuries.
Returning to the question of why the language of experience must be situated in culture-history, a second reason involves conventional polysemy in which each of muliple senses of a term or construction is semantically related to others (Langacker 1987, 1990). Every language and semantic domain is characterized by distinctive networks of polysemy. Experiential terms are no less polysemous than those of other domains. Each of several senses of a term corresponds to a conventional, culturally defined situation that has emerged as a gestalt from a consensus reached in the history of community discourse. Thus, analysis of polysemy is important to contextualizing experiential language, but it is not the subject of this paper.
So what are the situations that invite grammatical choices, and constrain them, in the Tagalog popular media that is consumed in, for example, Manila and Las Vegas? How do individual and family situations relate to Tagalog culture-history? Are situations localized to each city, say, as unemployment or high demand for services, or are they defined by the relationship between the two countries of origin, perhaps as dependency or dominance? Are situations created by a transnational community that transcends both locales, as in the movements of people and their relationships with those that remain and those they encounter? For a characterization of the culture-historical context, I will rely heavily on The Philippine Temptation: Dialectics of Philippines-U.S. Literary Relations by E. San Juan, Jr. (1996). Rather than accepting his perspective uncritically, I will treat it as one to which I can compare my own, which is largely formed on the basis of contacts with Filipinos living in Las Vegas.
San Juan (1996:5) speaks of over four hundred years of colonial oppression and resistance, which have created a Filipino identity that is "fissured and sedimented" (1996:14-15). In the 20th Century, subjugation to the United States has resulted in "the inferiorized condition of the Filipino" living in a situation of dependency, which has become so embedded in Filipino culture as to constitute a way of life. San Juan calls this way of life a "constellation of action" and a "nexus of tropes," in short, a "habitus (in Pierre Bourdieu's terminology)". The result has been the Filipino diaspora in which hundreds of thousands have migrated to the U.S. seeking escape from political oppression and poverty or dearth of opportunity. San Juan identifies three stages or "waves" of immigration: (1) The migrant labor movement from 1903 to 1930, which brought young men to work in the fields and canneries of California and Alaska; (2) the importation of war brides and the naturalization of males through service in the U.S. Army and Navy during and after WWII; and (3) the "continuing influx of skilled workers and professionals through family reunification" that began after the 1965 liberalization of U.S. immigration law (1996:95). Filipinos in the U.S. are now 70 percent foreign-born and 60 percent female. The third wave of approximately 630,000 people is "the most numerous and complexly stratified group, due to the fact that they have moved at a time when all sectors of Philippine society were undergoing cataclysmic change" (1996:116). This last group harbors nationalist sentiments and hopes of returning home "if and when their life chances improve." The immediate cause of the diaspora in the latter decades of the 20th Century is "the immense disarticulation of the local economy by the depredations of the Marcos dictatorship and the avarice of its transnational patrons" (1996:15). By "transnational patrons" one supposes that he is referring to multinational corporations and agencies of the U.S. government.
The most recent immigrants, presumably those of the 1980s and 90s, are composed of "(1) urban professionals, strata exhibiting a self-centered concern for mobility and status via consumerism, and (2) a progressive majority who occupy the lower echelons of the working class exposed to the worst forms of class, racial, and national oppression." (1996:116). It is the first segment of the recently arrived cohort, the urban professionals, that is best represented in the film analyzed in this paper. San Juan (1996:96-97) portrays the Filipino diaspora as dominated on the one hand by "U.S. market ideology" and on the other by "neoliberal paradigms in Philippine society and the cultu ral subjugation of individual Filipinos". Part of this cultural subjugation involves an orientation to the service economy:
As long as this geopolitics of Philippine dependency dictates the contingencies of development for the majority of Filipinos, we can expect the transplantation of Filipino bodies into the U.S. to continue and with it the corresponding recolonizing of sensibilities for the complex needs of a service and information-oriented economy [emphasis added - GBP] (1996:101).
The market-oriented sensibility springs partly from "the hegemonic power of the U.S. Imaginary", which is "a network of fantasies programmed in Filipino psyches by a massive influx of U.S. media / ideological products to promise the fulfillment of dreams for every Filipino" (San Juan 1996:102). One need not look far to see evidence of "the U.S. Imaginary" in language. One of the most obvious signs of the sway that it holds over Filipino minds is the heavy use of English code-switching and mixing among young urban professionals.
San Juan (1996) describes a countervailing view of the situation that is championed by post-modernist authors, such as Yen Le Espiritu (1994). Espiritu's is a more chaotic view of Filipino ethnogenesis (stressing flux, multiplicity, multilinearity, negotiation and invented cultural practices). Espiritu's post-modernist story stands in symbolic opposition to the kind of story that anthropologists told in the 1950s, a more elementary tale of identities torn between nativism and assimilation (San Juan: 1996). In the post-modernist interpretation, there is no master narrative, no cultural configuration. Thus, there can be no collective solution. That is what bothers San Juan. While approving Espiritu's emphasis on invented cultural practices aimed at "both resistance to and acceptance of class and racial hierarchy", he (1996:102) finds her orientation to be "rigorously individualist and also grossly empiricist".
San Juan emphasizes the need for continuity with the collectively oriented struggles of writers such as Carlos Bulosan and Jose Garcia Villa, both of whom worked in the farm labor movement of the 1930s. San Juan (1966:117) claims to see a collective consciousness in the making. His story of the Philippines is a grand historical narrative whose villains are racist colonialists, neocolonialists, and neoliberals. Their machinations have created dependency, poverty, and subalternity of peoples subjugated within the ideology and differentiated niches of the market economy. The agonists are the Filipino people (symbolized by activist migrant farm workers) who must recognize their predicament, resist it collectively, and perhaps, like Bulosan, achieve a Christ-like trancendance indebted only to native Filipino morality.
In places, San Juan seems not to differentiate between Filipinos in the islands and those who have migrated to the U.S., as when he speaks of "local experiences" in "the [Philippine] islands" as evidence of "the demonization of the immigrant" as a "threat to the 'American Way of Life'":
In almost every exchange I have had with Filipinos in various parts of the [Philippine] islands for the last three decades, I have discovered a strong family resemblance among local experiences that manifest something analogous to Strobel' s patterned discontinuities, a syntagmatic chain of intentionality that binds random and dispersed 'noises,' aleatory impulses, and happenstance. Is this evidence of a counterhegemonic Filipino collective consciousness in the making, in response to what has displaced Cold War antagonisms---namely, the demonization of the immigrant as suspicious 'undocumented alien' and threat to the "American Way of Life" (1996:103)?
San Juan concedes that many Filipinos have not yet recognized the true nature of their predicament and the costs of dependency. Among those who promote and accept dependency, there is a "libidinal investment in an archetypal pattern of exile and redemptive return" (1966:117). In his view, the concept of exile must be related to the global division of labor "under the dictat of U.S. finance capital (via IMF / World Bank, the United Nations, and private foundations) " (1966:118). He speaks ruefully of Filipinos' "persistently reproduced subordination," their "gratitude for being given an entry visa," and their cherished belief in national parity with the United States (San Juan:124).
Although we have seen that San Juan may have intentionally abolished a distinction between Filipinos in the islands and those in the U.S., what he and others seem not to take explicitly into account is the transnational pose of so many contemporary Filipino families. It is not simply that Filipinos are enmeshed in transnational cultural fields; they are also creating and expanding them. Many apparent residents of the U.S. not only have family members in the islands, but they also maintain businesses and part-time jobs there. Travel to and fro and the shipping of goods in "balikbayan ('return-country') boxes" are commonplaces in the lives of Filipinos living in Las Vegas, at least of those with the means to travel and purchase consumer goods. When finances permit, elderly parents and school-age children are brought to the U.S., either temporarily or permanently. At intervals, parents may demand return visits paid for by their children.
How do such transient lifestyles and polarized orientations between Manila and Las Vegas affect the formation of personal identities? Transnational lifestyles may foster acceptance of multiple nationalities, raising the question of whether these nationalities are compartmentalized or integrated, of whether one activates them as needed or inhabits a position along a continuum stretching between identities of Manila and Las Vegas. Linguistic code-switching and mixing provide evidence for a strategy of cultural integration. Community leaders also appear to stress integration, as when they arrange for the singing of both the U.S. and Filipino national anthems at ethnic picnics. At the same picnic, a Filipina singer covers songs of Janet Jackson and other American pop stars. Booths display cell phones and and advertise cable TV, proclaiming an enthusiastic embracement of American-style consumerism.
But gaudy displays of American pop culture can be misleading. Many --- or possibly most --- Filipinos in Las Vegas, including those earning low incomes as service workers in the hotels, make large financial remittances to support families in the islands, both to improve the life of those who remain and to bring family members to the U.S. for family reunification, education, and employment, thus closing the circle in what appears to be a positive feedback process as families rachet themselves into niches of the U.S. economy and expand their economies back in the islands . The remittance of funds from foreign countries to the Philippines has become the country's largest industry, providing over six billion dollars worth of foreign exchange according to the documentary film Modern Heroes... (1998).
Obviously, Filipino authors such as San Juan are not oblivious to the traffic between the U.S. and the Philippines. One can see the notion of a transnational community adumbrated in San Juan's writing. He recognized that the "collapse of distance by the greater scope and frequency of modern communication and travel" has had the effect of reinforcing links of the diaspora to the islands and influencing community politics and culture here" (in the U.S.?). He observed, following Occen, that this created a situation quite different from the previous period "when the Filipino community was in the process of evolving a conspicuously distinct subculture which was principally a reflection of their experiences in U.S. society and alien in many ways to the national culture of the Philippines itself" (1966:116). But it remains to be seen whether Filipino authors will come to see transnational communities as a new cultural formation integrating the lives of sedentary family members in communities of origination and destination with those of emigrants, immigrants, and transmigrants. It is almost as though Filipino authors themselves subscribe subconsciously and nostalgically to a polar model in which one is either here or there, living the archetypal myth of exile and redemptive return.
Ideology and Grammar
If the fantasies of the U.S. media are truly "programmed in Filipino psyches", as San Juan asserts, then they should also surface in Filipino media. Will those media simply reproduce American themes of the market economy --- consumerism, individual achievement, accumulation, competition, and consumption --- or will we find them interlaced with other themes arising from Filipino culture and history? If the latter, will American ideas provide sources of drama, contradictions, and tensions? Will they produce identities characterized by restless flux, multiplicity, polyvocality, and multilineality "in dialogue with and in opposition to the racist ideologies and practices within the United States" (Espiritu 1994, quoted in San Juan 1996:102)? Will Filipinos respond with the language of the oppressed and subaltern, with fantasies of exile and redemptive return? Will their themes be ingratiation and willing acquiescence to co-optation, or will they speak ideologies that are counter-cultural and anti-hegemonic? Or will they merge American themes with historically determined Filipino themes into an ethos that provides the possibility of coherent, satisfying individual and group identities, either in concordance with or in opposition to ideologies and practices within the United States? Will their archetypal predicaments and experiences spring from local perspectives or will they be recognizably transnational?
Whatever poses are adopted by Filipinos, will we be able to determine how they are realized in the subjective language of experience? If we take the position of cognitive linguistics (a la Langacker 1987 and Lakoff 1987) and what I have termed cultural linguistics--- that grammar includes semantics, and semantics implicates encyclopedic knowledge --- then the interpretation of grammar in actual discourse may require the thick description of culture history. Perhaps a close analysis of the grammar of experience will provide some insight into what San Juan (1966:117) calls "the predicament of the intractable temper of Filipino subjectivity."
But the context of Filipino transnational experience seems almost hopelessly complex and layered. How can one possibly relate it to the elegant paradigms of grammar as understood by linguists? Perhaps the best way to begin is to collate some expressions and constructions that speak of subjective experience. These are provided in the next section. Following that, I will examine the grammar of emotional and cognitive experience in a contemporary melodrama. The video Sana'y Maulit Muli 'Hope for Renewal' dramatizes several facets of the predicament of the Tagalog transnational community, at least as experienced by two young middle-class lovers, Agnes and Jerry. They experience anguished separation from home, family, and friends. They encounter dehumanizing ideologies and onerous social demands of the market economy. They are exploited by callous employers and immigration officials. Agnes discovers the freedom, danger, and loneliness of feminine self-reliance. Nevertheless, they both succumb to the temptations and comforts of consumerism. My hope is that a close examination of the language of experience within the neocolonial and transnational context discussed above will help to reveal the drama of transnational lives as they are represented in the Tagalog popular media.
Tagalog Experiential Language
In Tagalog, persistent inner feelings and emotions (damdamin and kalooban) are contrasted with transient feelings (pakiramdam ) caused by outside events that effect the body or the emotions.4 Thoughts and feelings contrast with the physical body (pisikal). Many mental experiences are characterized as things that happen to a person (nangyayari sa isang tao). The self can be described in terms of parts of the personality (bahagi ng pagkatao) or in terms of the inner being (niloloob) or soul (kaluluwa). Other salient Tagalog categories include conditions or states, thinking, knowledge, consciousness, attitudes, and capacities. Many terms for cognitive activities are described as ways of doing something. Tagalog also characterizes types of people as, for example, intelligent, stupid, slow, lazy, easily irritated, or having abnormal thoughts. Other language of cognition and emotions describes characteristic actions and movements. Some thoughts and emotions are expressed metaphorically.
The ethnosemantic analysis provides some orientation, but the language of emotional and cognitive experience is more than a lexicon of emotion- and cognition-terms. Speakers recruit every aspect of language, from prosody to morphology, lexicon, clause, narrative, and conversational rhythm, to communicate experiential meanings. The following list provides only a few of the lexical and phrasal options available in Tagalog. They are mostly excerpts from songs by YANO and Parokya ni Edgar, musical groups whose tapes are played by teenagers and young adults in both the Philippines and Las Vegas. A few are from Sana'y Maulit Muli. Full Tagalog text and morphological analyses are presented only where necessary. Vertical bars link analyses and translations of a single item.
Use of English Emotion Terms in Tagalog or Mixed Text (1) barat na allocation sa education 'stingy allocations for education' commercialization, colonialization privatization, kawang oblation 'privatization, pitiful initiations' sa state university 'at state university' state u, hate u , sa state university "State U." (from YANO) (2) I went with you kasi crush kita , noon pa because crush you: DRC REM still because I had a crush on you, still "Senti" 'Sentimental' (from YANO) (3) Ngayon ako'y nagsisisi kung bakit ako nag "I love you"!!! now 1S:REF:INV GER:regret if why 1S:REF REAL:AGT:"I love you" 'Now I am regretting ever saying "I love you"!!!' "Maniwala Ka Sana" 'Your Belief Is Hope' (from Parokya Ni Edgar) Obscenity (4) Right in front of me in the jeepney, a lady praying with the rosary, her eyes shut stopped in front of the convent "only at the bus stop" said the driver "I might get caught [stopping elsewhere]." the lady just kept swearing banal na aso, santong kabayo 'holy dog, horse saint' natatawa ako, hi, hi, hi, hi, sa 'yo 'I was amused, hi, hi, hi, hi, at you' "Banal na Aso, Santong Kabayo" 'Holy Dog, Horse Saint' (from YANO) Mimesis of Psycho-ostensives (5) natatawa ako, hi, hi, hi, hi , sa 'yo 'I was amused, hi, hi, hi, hi, at you' "Banal na Aso..." Description of Psycho-ostensives (6) he was going out of the bathroom when he stepped on a kitten katakot-takot na kamot si kaka'y napadaing STAT:RDP2:fear LIG scratch PR:REF PRNM:INV REAL:STAT:CAUS:complain 'horrific scratches, Kakay cried out' "Kaka" (a common name, like Joe) (from YANO) Use of Tagalog Emotion Term (7) glancing around (window shopping), but can't afford to buy glancing around, but can't even watch movies without any money except for bus fare can only afford to buy two cigarettes it's crazy, this kind of life di nakakaaliw ang ganitong buhay NEG REAL:STAT:RDP:STAT:consolation REF kind:LIG life 'it's no fun, this kind of life' Esem ['SM' = ShoeMart] (from YANO) (8) natatawa ako , hi, hi, hi, hi, sa 'yo 'I was amused, hi, hi, hi, hi, at you' "Banal na Aso... " Repetition (9) ako, mahal kita, mahal na mahal 'I love you, love of love' "Senti " Use of Verb with Process that Results in Emotion or Feeling (10) Hindi mo alam kung gaano mo ako sasaktan. NEG 2S:GEN know COND how 2S:GEN 1S:REF hurt:LOC 'You don't know how much you hurt me.' "Sana'y Maulit Muli" Description of Facial Expressions (Conceptual Metonymy) (11) he managed to step on thumbtacks gumulong at nagkaduling-duling AGT:roll and REAL:AGT:STAT:RDP2:cross-eyed 'he rolled on the floor and got cross-eyed' "Kaka " (12) Pakiramdam ko ngayon ako ay pagmumukhang gago! CAUS:DSR:RDP2:feel 1:GEN now 1S:REF INV GER:RDP:face:LIG stupid 'My feeling now I am making a stupid face.' "Maniwala... " Use of Metaphor (13) nababato ako gusto kong umuwi REAL:STAT:RDP:stone 1S:REF want 1S:GEN:LIG AGT:go.home I am turned to stone, bored, my desire is to go home. "Sana'y... " Denial of Emotion (14) Matuto kang maging manhid. IRR:STAT:learn 2S:LIG IRR:STAT:become insensitive 'Learn to become insensitive.' "Sana'y... "
What one quickly notices in these expressions is that many emotion terms have verbal
prefixes. The default construction appears to be the passive, indicated with affixes -in-
and -i-, coded here as UG, for undergoer, and -an, coded as
LOC. Tagalog voice prefixes may also be active with -um- giving agent focus,
often implying intransitive voluntary or involuntary action or intransitive process,
though in some constructions -um- appears to be transitive. Whether a
construction with -um- predicates a controlling or a non-controlling agent
appears to be governed by the semantics of the verb stem. Active voice prefixes may
alternatively be antipassive, implying agent focus and control, often with transitive
action (Guzman: 1999). Antipassive forms include mag- and nag-. The
related form pag- is often translated with a gerund. Stative forms (ma-
and na-) resemble the passive in that focal participants lack control. Figures
are undergoers or patients. The forms mag- and ma- are irrealis,
involving subjunctive and future senses; nag- and na- are realis,
involving present progressive (incompletive) and completed actions.5 Related to
mag- and nag- are maN- and naN-. The grammatical
framework is presented in Table 1:
a In this analysis, -in- ~ ni- is also regarded as an affix of realis mood and -in is regarded as irrealis mood. The analysis of the undergoer affixes is, I think, consistent with a recent unpublished analysis by Nikolaus Himmelmann, a draft of which is entitled "Lexical categories and voice in Tagalog".
b It seems likely, as Ricardo Nolasco (personal communication, 1999) contends, that -um- is allomorphic with the m- of mag- and ma- forms. Irrealis -um- and m- occur in complementary distribution under certain constraints. Under this analysis, -um- conflates the irrealis with a realis sense deriving from an obsolete Tagalog form -ung-.
In the analysis presented in the following section, I will distinguish between the passive -in-, -i- and -an- forms, the stative ma-, na- forms, the antipassive mag-, nag- forms, and -um- forms. In the passive forms, the figure or focal participant is an undergoer, lacking control over a process. Stative forms are taken as evidence that the figure is merely an experiencer, again lacking control. Anti-passive constructions will be taken as evidence that speaker perceives the figure to have some control. Constructions with -um- will be examined to determine whether agency is implied by the semantics of the verb stem. Furthermore, control over actions and processes will be taken as evidence of at least partial control over situations, as perceived by speakers.
Sana'y Maulit Muli, a Transnational Melodrama
In this section, examples are from the film Sana'y Maulit Muli 'Hope for Renewal', or from consultants' discussions of the film. Passages containing language descr ibing feelings or thoughts are presented in boldface type and subjected to morphological analysis. Of special interest is the frequent use of expressions suggesting lack of control. Expressions revealing active control by protagonists appear only as directives received by them and as uncharacteristically assertive outbursts occurring in moments of crisis. In the film, Lea Salonga plays Agnes, a young middle-class woman who has a boyfriend Jerry, who is in advertising. Jerry is played by Aga Mulach. Jerry is ambitious and spends a lot of time with his attractive boss, Cynthia, often leaving Agnes alone. Agnes's mother wants her to come to the United States, where the mother is living. Jerry's cousin Nick arrives from America, looking rich and important. After a difficult interview with an immigration officer, Agnes is moping about the house, dreading the thought of leaving Jerry. Her Aunt tells her, in (15), to take control of her life. She perceives Agnes as allowing the heart to rule, an expression that uses a stative causative form, p-in-a-iiral. The realis -in- infixed to the pa- apparently highlights the fact that allowing the heart to rule is what Agnes has actually been doing.
(15)
Sa panahon ngayon kailangan maging praktikal, hindi puweding puro puso ang pinaiiral.
in time now necessity becoming practical NEG can.be pure heart REF REAL:CAUS:RDP:rule
'In these times when it is necessary to be practical, you can't allow the heart to rule.'
When departure seems imminent, Agnes says, "Don't let me go; I don't want to go." Jerry says,
(16)
Tandaan mo, mahal na mahal na mahal kita.
Remember:LOC 2S:GEN loved LIG loved LIG loved 2S:REF
'You remember, you are loved, loved, loved.'
Mahal in (16) is attributive, suggesting that being loved is involuntary. At the denouement of this story, we will hear Jerry use the active form mag-mahal, highlighting the role of human agency.6 Agnes goes to San Francisco. I asked our consultant, who herself had only recently arrived in the U.S., how she would feel in this situation. She answered, nalulongkot, a word usually glossed as 'melancholy', but here as 'lonely' or 'homesick'. You could also say "homesick na ako" 'I am homesick now'. You miss the Philippines and think of what you would do if you were there. If you had been in the U.S. for a long time, you could say nakakaamis 'oppressed' or you could be "stoned" with boredom. The grammar is stative (nababato) and passive (gusto kong):
(17)
nababato ako gusto kong umuwi
REAL:STAT:RDP:stone 1S:REF want 1S:GEN:LIG AGT:go.home
I am stoned, bored with my desire to go home.
In Manila, Jerry's mother is incensed that Agnes has left him to go to the U.S. She curses Agnes, calling her a punetang babaeng, roughly, 'whoring woman'. Jerry's boss is trying to seduce him and his parents fight over Agnes's behavior and Jerry's distraction. In America, Agnes's brother and sister mistreat her. Her mother tells her she has to use her brain: gamitin mo ang utak mo. Agnes says,
(18a)
Ayoko dito.
dislike:1S:GEN PROX:LOC
'I don't like it here.'(18b)
Wala akong kakampi, mamamatay ako sa lungkot.
lack 1S:REF:LIG RDP:take.side STAT:RDP:die 1SG:REF DRC melancholy
'I'm not taking sides, I'm dying of home sickness.'
In (18a), ayoko is a contraction of ayaw ko. In (18b), ma-mamatay 'dying', is stative. But Agnes also says she is not ready to get married. She does dirty work as a nurse and meets a Filipina friend. In Manila, Jerry gets promoted. Jerry's mother interferes with their phone calls. Due to lack of communication and miscommunication, their relationship is starting to get blurry (nagkahalabuan < labo 'blur'). Jerry is torn over his relationship with his boss. As they sit in the car, he says to her:
(19a)
Ang pakiramdam ko tama ang ginagawa ko pag ikaw kausap ko.
REF CAUS:REQ:RDP:feel 1S:GEN right REF REAL:RDP:do 1S:GEN when 2S:REF STAT:talk 1S:GEN
'My feeling is that what I am doing is right when you talk to me.'(19b)
Pero pag naririnig ko ang iyak ni Agnes,
but AGT:REAL:STAT:INCM:hear 1SG:GEN REF cry PR:GEN PRNM
'But when I hear Agnes crying,'(19c)
pag nababasa ko ang mga sulat niya parang mali eh.
when STAT:RDP:read 1S:GEN REF PL letter 3S:GEN like:LIG wrong eh
'when I read her letter it seems wrong, eh.'(19d)
Malaki na nga ang tampo niya sa akin.
great now EMPH REF hurt~anger 3S:GEN DRC 1S:DRC
'She is really feeling hurt and resentful towards me.'
All of the terms expressing experience and emotion in (19) are stative or externally caused, signifying lack of control on the part of the experiencer: pa-ki-ramdam, na-ririnig, even na-babasa 'read'. In (19d), the word tampo predicates a feeling of anger and hurt, a sense of sulkiness, often felt between two people who are close or love each other. Otherwise, one would say nagagalit 'anger' or naiinis 'irritation'. Jerry won't let Agnes come home. She is then attacked in an alley. She escapes and tries to call him, but he is at Cynthia's place. Agnes goes crazy (na-babaliw, another stative form). While in this state, she says,
(20)
Ang tanga ko, ang tanga ko, ang tanga tanga ko.
'My stupidity, my stupidity, my great stupidity.' (or 'How stupid of me,…')Bakit, bakit ganoon?
'Why, why like this?'Naniwal. Bakit niya ako niloko ?
REAL:STAT:believe why 3S:GEN 1S:REF REAL:fool
'I believed him. Why did he fool me?'
Here the self-characterizing mental state is defective (stupidity). Agnes's participation in the verb phrases is stative (na-niwala) and as undergoer (ako ni-loko). Her mother urges her to take control: "Huwag kang magpakagaga." 'Don't act stupid'; "He's only a guy. Learn to live for yourself." In contrast to the passive language of Agnes, the form mag-paka-gaga has active focus. The inner prefix complex pa-ka- has an aptative sense.
(21)
Huwag kang magpakagaga .
don't 2SG:REF IRR:AGT:APTV:stupid
'Don't act stupid'
Agnes and her mother have a tearful scene of reconciliation. Agnes refuses Jerry's call from Manila and his application for a visa is denied. Increasingly self-reliant, Agnes becomes a real estate agent with her own apartment and car. Jerry goes to New York on business and then comes to San Francisco to visit her. Agnes's speech is assertive and impersonal. She is distant. Jerry says "Why did you disappear? I didn't disappear? I finally realized [na-tau-han ako, another stative form]. It was a long time before I accepted that your work took you away from me and your ambition grabbed you away from me." Agnes says,
(22)
Mahirap magkaintindihan ang dalawang tao na nasa magkabilang dulo ng mundo.
hard IRR:AGT:STAT:understand:LOC REF two:LIG person LIG LOC AGT:side:LIG end GEN world
'It is hard for two people to understand each other from the opposite ends of the world.'
This is a turning point in the plot and in the grammar, sowing the seed of eventual reconciliation. Although the adverbial mahirap is stative or attributive, Agnes has used an agentive form in the prefix on mag-ka-intindi-han 'understand each other'. The sense of reciprocity is predicated by the mag -___- an construction, which may owe its meaning to a conceptual metaphor to the effect that localized action is reciprocal action. Jerry says, "Mahal mo pa ba ako Agnes?" 'Do you still love me, Agnes?', to which she replies "Natakot ako." 'I'm scared.' Jerry says "Dahil hindi ko kayang wala ka, dahil mahal kita." 'Because I can't exist without you, because I love you." To this, Agnes literally "gave in" (bumigay). All of the forms used by both Jerry and Alice are stative (mahal, natako, mahal) or existential (kaya), signifying lack of control by the referential agonist, except for Agnes's acquiescence with bumigay, an agentive form. Jerry now becomes an undocumented worker, a TNT (from tago ng tago 'hide, hide'). He gets a series of jobs chopping wood, washing cars, and washing dishes. Agnes is too busy to see him, as Jerry was to busy to see her in the beginning in Manila. She stands him up on dates, telling him she doesn't have time to see him because life in America is highly competitive. Jerry says,
(23)
Ang hirap Indianin.
REF difficult Indian:IRR
'It's hard to stand someone up.'Feeling ko tae. 'Tang ina tae. Hindi ko na siya hawak.
feeling 1S:GEN shit puta :LIG mother shit NEG 1S:GEN LIG 3SG:REF hold
'I feel like shit. Putang mother shit. I don't control her.'
Perhaps the code-mixing (Indianin) and switching (Feeling ko) is a marker of Jerry's rising level of emotion. Neither form has an active marker. His feeling of helplessness is explicit: Hindi ko na siya hawak. Now it is Agnes who receives a proposal of marriage from her boss, Dave. She turns down his proposal and later tells Jerry:
(24)
Pagod na pagod na ako sa kakapaliwanag kung sino at ano ko si Dave.
tired LIG tired now 1S:REF DRC RDP:STAT:CAUS:bright COND who and what PR:REF PRNM
'I am oppressed now by the realization that my who and what is Dave.'Sawang-sawa na ako sa kakaselos mo.
satisfied:LIG:satisfied now 1S:REF DRC RDP:STAT:jealous 2S:GEN
'I have had enough of your jealousy.'Hindi na ako ang dating Agnes na sunod sunuran.
NEG now 1S:REF REF former:LIG PRNM LIG follow follow:LOC
'I am not the former Agnes following in obediance.'
Again, none of the predications in (23) and (24) are active. They are either attributive (pagod na pagod, sawang-sawa , tae), stative (kakaselos), negative existential (hindi), or irrealis with a tacit undergoer (Indianin). Nevertheless, Agnes states her rebellion explicitly and emphatically (hindi...sunod sunuran). Jerry sees Agnes get a goodnight kiss from Dave. Jealous, he says to Agnes, "Did he get what he wants from you? Is he your lover?" Jerry then gives her an assaultive kiss. He says,
(25)
Oo mataas ka na ngayon.
'Yes you are so high now.'Pero huwag mo namang iparamdam sa akin na ganito na ako kaliit.
but don't 2S:GEN rather UG:CAUS:RDP2:feel DRC 1S:DRC LIG like:PROX 1S:REF STAT:small
'But don't make me feel that I am small like this.'
Jerry's words again suggest lack of control.
Iparamdam refers to something that causes a feeling, a reason for an external cause. Kaliit is a stative form. He continues, now using a flurry of realis forms with grammatical undergoers or objects (nilunok, sinakripisyo, nilamon , tiniis) not only to describe the sacrifices he has made, but also the difficulties he has endured, and the feelings he is experiencing. All have passive morphology. The expression of love (mahal) remains stative. This passage reaches a climax with Jerry's use of two active forms describing his attempts to overcome the oppression of his circumstances in (26e) and (26f): nag-susumigaw 'shouting' and nag-babakasakali 'hoping to repeat the past'.
(26a)
Wala akong kasalanan sa iyo Agnes, pero para sa iyo nilunok ko ang pride ko.
but for DRC 2S:DRC REAL:swallow 1S:GEN REF pride 1S:GEN
'I didn't do anything wrong to you Agnes, but for you I have swallowed my pride.'(26b)
Sinakripisyo ko ang magandang kinabukasan ko sa Pilipinas.
REAL:sacrifice 1S:GEN REF beautiful STAT:REAL:open:LOC 1S:GEN DRC PRNM
'I sacrificed a beautiful future in the Philippines.'(26c)
Nilamon ko ang prinsipyo ko. Niloko ko ang pamilya ko.
REAL:eat.big.peice 1S:GEN REF principle 1S:GEN REAL:fool 1S:GEN REF family 1S:GEN
'I ate a big piece of my principles. I fooled my family.'(26d)
Tiniis ko ang hirap ng buhay dito.
REAL:endure 1S:GEN REF difficult GEN life PROX:DRC
'I endured a hard life here.'(26e)
Kahit nagsusumigaw ang kalooban ko, dahil mahal kita,
in.spite.of REAL:AGT:RDP:shout REF inner.feeling 1S:GEN because love 2S:REF
'In spite of this I am shouting out my inner feelings, because I love you,'(26f)
dahil nagbabakasakali akong maulit yung dati.
because REAL:AGT:RDP:perhaps:in.case 1S:REF IRR:STAT:repeat REM:REF:LIG former
'because I am perhaps hoping to repeat the past.'
Agnes is moved. She voices her injury in a stative form (na-saktan), but describes her struggle in active form (nag-hirap). Her achievements are presented, perhaps out of modesty, in stative realis forms (na-ka-rating sa k-in-a-roroon-an). She says,
(27)
Hindi mo alam kung gaano mo ako nasaktan.
NEG 2S:GEN know COND how 2S:GEN 1S:REF REAL:STAT:hurt:LOC
'You don't know how much you hurt me.'Huwag mo ipamukha sa akin ang mga sakripisyo mo.
'Don't show me your sacrifices.'Hindi mo alam kung gaano ako naghirap
NEG 2S:GEN know COND how 1S:REF REAL:AGT:difficult
'You don't know how I have struggled'bago ako nakarating sa kinaroroonan ko ngayon.
change 1S:REF REAL-STAT-STAT-arrive DRC STAT-REAL-RDP-REM-LOC 1S:GEN now
'only recently to reach where I am now.'
Tearful, Agnes and Jerry embrace. She says, in English "I felt so alone." One would think the film might conclude with this climactic scene of reconciliation, but Agnes is made a branch manager of her real estate firm in Florida. Jerry goes back to work. When his boss abuses a worker, another worker says, in sympathy, using an irrealis form unmarked for active mood:
(28)
Parang sasabog ang dibdib ko.
like RDP:burst REF chest 1S:GEN
As though bursting my heart'.
Jerry's boss turns the complaining worker into immigration and he is deported. Jerry's cousin Nick tells him, "If I were you, just bury your feelings. Learn to become insensitive."
(29)
Kung ako sa iyo ibaon mo na lang ang nararamdaman mo.
COND 1S:REF DRC 2S:DRC UG:bury 2S:GEN now just REF REAL:STAT:RDP:RDP2:feel:LOC 2S:GEN
'If I were you, just bury your feelings.'Matuto kang maging manhid.
IRR:STAT:learn 2S:LIG IRR:STAT:become insensitive
'Learn to become insensitive.'
Jerry returns to work and breaks a carton of eggs. He is berated by the boss. Jerry says, "Makapal ang mukha" 'Thick, your face', meaning, "You are shameless". Jerry unburdens himself to Agnes:
(30)
Yung nangyayari sa loob, nasisira ang pagkatao.
REM:REF:LIG REAL:STAT:RDP:happen DRC inside REAL:STAT:RDP:break REF GER:STAT:person
'What is happening inside, (my) humanity is disintegrating.'Alam mong hindi ko kayang magmahal nang hindi buo ang pagkatao ko.
know 2S:GEN:LIG NEG 1S:GEN EX:LIG IRR:AGT:love when NEG whole REF GER:STAT:person 1S:GEN
'You know I can't love when my humanity is not whole.'I'm losing respect for myself.
Ayaw kong sa susunod mawalan ka na rin ng respecto sa akin.
don't:want DRC ICM:follow IRR:STAT:lose 2S:REF now also GEN respect DRC 1S:DRC
'I don't want what follows to be losing you and also your respect for me.'
Here Jerry lacks control over what is happening inside, the disintegration of his humanity. But the construction of love is mag-mahal, with an active rather than stative prefix. Thus, at the end of this saga, Jerry realizes that his capacity to love is something over which he ultimately has control. He doesn' t want to lose Agnes and her respect for him. Possibility of loss is expressed in the stative reciprocal voice and irrealis mood (ma-wala-n). Jerry returns to Manila, where he takes up his old role as an assertive advertising man. One day, Agnes shows up in Makati, the upscale business area of Manila. The film ends on their encounter. Is this a return to the status quo ante, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream?7 Perhaps not. The film never tells us that Agnes returns to sit at home waiting for Jerry to call when his business affairs permit. Instead the dominance of Agnes in America suggests either that she returns on her own terms as a successful business woman, or that she has returned as a transnational who will continue to maintain business and residential ties in the U.S. Still, I think that we are led to conclude that Jerry and Agnes resume their relationship.
Conclusions
Sana'y Maulit Muli depicts the predicament of a middle-class Filipino couple in largely passive terms. Lack of control of main characters over events is evident even in the title words Sana 'Hope' and Maulit ('is repeated' ), which uses the stative voice and irrealis mood. In Manila, Agnes waits helplessly while Jerry pursues a frenetic career with an advertising agency. Agnes reluctantly goes to San Francisco to join her mother. There, she attains self-reliance and launches a successful career, but in the process she becomes cold and distant. Jerry, the archetypal career man in Manila, follows her to San Francisco, where he finds the tables turned as he is now the one who waits helplessly while Agnes pursues her career. To recall San Juan's phrase, she is undergoing a "recolonizing of sensibilities for the complex needs of a service and information-oriented economy". Jerry's seductive female boss in Manila is mirrored by Agnes's attentive male boss in San Francisco. Agnes loses he r humanity in drudge work at first, and later in success and consumerism, symbolized by a nice apartment and car. Jerry loses his in drudge work, inhumane working conditions, and alienation from Agnes.
This is a story about a transnational family. It is Agnes' s mother who urges her to come and join her in America, but both Jerry and Agnes lack enthusiasm for the transnational lifestyle. Realizing the inhumanity and alienation of their life in America, they return to Manila, fulfilling the myth of exile and redemptive return and reaffirming the warm values of Filipino culture. Jerry returns to the world of advertising, Agnes returns, implicitly, to a life with Jerry, but apparently on her own terms. Sana'y Maulit Muli strikes one more as a story of two kids from the country who get lost in the city than as a blow to neocolonial market values. It deplores consumerism and exploitation of labor in the U.S., but affirms the commercialism of advertising in Manila. It portrays inhumane exploitation of Filipino labor, but the oppressed respond with withdrawal rather than organized resistence. They can escape because they are middle class. The predicaments in this film may be common ones for displaced Filipinos, but its message poses little threat to neocolonial structures of inequality.
Analysis of the grammar of experience helps us to see more clearly how the producers have dramatized transnational and neocolonial themes and how grammar is situated in historical contexts. Throughout most of the film, the grammar of experience of Jerry and Agnes is stative and passive, implying lack of control. By contrast, their relatives speak a language of agency, urging them to take control of their lives. When Jerry and Agnes finally realize and admit to their predicament, Agnes adopts an active reciprocal form (magkaintindihan 'understand each other'). But Jerry and Alice continue to voice their oppression in various stative, attributive, passive, and existential forms. When Jerry sees Alice get a goodnight kiss from her boss, he unleashes his frustrations with a flurry of verbs unmarked f or agency ('swallowed my pride', 'sacrificed', 'ate a big piece of my principles', 'endured', 'shouting'). As life in America becomes even more dismal, Jerry feels his humanity disintegrating. Finally, realizing that even his ability to love is in jeopardy, Jerry uses an active form for emotional experience --- magmahal --- to predicate his capacity to love. He returns from exile to the world of advertising in Manila. Thus, it appears that there is a grammar of experience that elucidates the situations portrayed in this popular melodrama. To the extent that this grammar is taken as authentic by young Filipinos living in the ambit of the United States, its study may help us to understand their experiences.
One might argue that the emotional expressions in this film are largely passive because Tagalog is an ergative language with a basically passive orientation (Guzman: 1999). But this line of argument implies that speakers lack a choice between passive and active expressions. To show that this is not the case, I offer expression (31), taken from page 1 of the new graphic novel Hinagap ang Alitin, by Gil D. Paguio:
(31)
Upang dito'y maghasik ng lagim sa sangkatauhan.
'This is so they can sow terror in all of humanity.'
This example shows that discussions of emotion can focus on actors and their actions, that is, on personal agency. Passive emotional expressions may be habitual and culturally preferred in most situations, but they are not obligatory. Perhaps further study will uncover contexts in which emotional expression is predominately anti-passive and active.
Endnotes
1. This is a revision of a paper presented to the session on "New Relativities in Discourses of Thinking and Feeling," Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Philadephia, December 2-8, 1999. I wish to thank John Swetnam for his helpful reading of the first draft. Useful corrections to translations were provided by Cecilia Conaco, who attended a presentation at the University of the Philippines, Diliman.
2. Other papers dealing with the language emotions in Tagalog include Palmer and Brown (1998), Palmer, Bennett and Stacey (n.d.), and Palmer (n.d.).
3. The Filipino consultants on this project are Marica Dakudao and Remedio Quindara. Their consciencious and insightful work is very much appreciated. Dakudao, who is from Davao City, lists her native languages as Tagalog, Visayan, and Ilonggo. At the time of the project, Dakudao was 20 years old and had been in the U.S. for less than two years. She was a junior in the program in Hotel Management. Quindara, who is from Manila, lists his native language as Tagalog. At the time of the project, he was 19 years old, a high-school graduate in Manila, and had been in the U. S. for a few months working in the kitchen of a hotel-casino. Consultants on this project were paid an hourly wage equivalent to that earned by teaching assistants at UNLV.
4. This paragraph summarizes information presented in Palmer (n.d.), which describes the Tagalog lexical and grammatical constructions that evoke domains of cognition and emotion.
5. See also Schachter (1987). One is tempted to include pa - as a stative form, analogous to pag -. I think one could make a case for it, but that is not the way it has been treated in the linguistic literature. For example, among his "active causative" forms, Drossard (1994) cites the constructions i-pa- and pa-...-an. Schachter and Otanes (1972:346, 354-355) list ipa-, pa-...-an , and pa-...-in. In apparent contradiction to Drossard, they give only one example that has actor focus, and in this case the focus is on a secondary actor. The form is patuyuin 'permit/cause to get dry'. No example of actual usage is given. They observe that pa-...-an occurs in object or dative focus counterparts of a very few agent focus ma- verbs. This suggests two things: (1) that pa- is related to ma-; and (2) that it may be the suffix -an that is reponsible for providing the apparent transitivity of this construction. The two examples given also contain the prefix ki-, which is a request form, also suggesting some agency: pakialaman 'meddle with' (DF counterpart of AF makialam); pakinggan 'listen' (OF/DF counterpart of AF makinig ). The base of makialam is alam 'know', which could give it the sense of 'requesting to know about', extendable to 'meddle with'. If the essential semantic component of Tagalog stativity is lack of control, these examples afford no good reason to classify them as active. Lack of personal agency can also be evoked with with forms that are attributive (adjectival, often with a ma- prefix), stative with the prefix ka-, negative existential (hindi), or irrealis with a tacit undergoer (BASE-in ).
6. One could also say minamahal kita. If we think of mahal as the base, then the only senses explicitly added by morphology are the incompletive, by means of reduplication of ma, and realis, by means of the infix -in. Thus, it is probably best to think of this form as predicating the default passive lack of control on the part of the one who is loved, i.e. the referential focal participant, kita. It is usually translated with the more active English expression I love you.
7. I am indebted to John Swetnam for this suggestion.
References
Buaken, Manuel. 1946. I Have Lived with the American People. Caldwell Idaho: Caxton Printers.
Drossard, Werner. 1994. "The Systematization of Tagalog Morphosyntax". Arbeitspapier Nr. 19 (Neiue Folge). Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität zu Köln.
Espiritu, Yen Le. 1994. The intersection of race, ethnicity, and class: the multiple identities of second-generation Filipinos. Identities 1:249-73.
Gumperz, John J. 1996. The linguistic and cultural relativity of inference. In John J. Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson (eds), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 374-406.
Guzman, Videa de. 1999. Lecture 2: The ergative analysis in the relational grammar framework. Lecture Series: Ergativity in Philippine Languages. February 11, 1999.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1991. "The Philippine challenge to universal grammar". Arbeitspapier Nr. 15 (Neue Folge) Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität zu Köln.
Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1, Theoretical Perspectives . Stanford: Stanford University Press.
-----. 1990. Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar. Renée Dirven and Ronald Langacker (eds). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Occeña, Bruce. 1985. The Filipino nationality in the U.S.: An overview. Line of March (Fall):29-41.
Palmer, Gary. 1996. Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics. Austin: University of Texas Press.
-----. n.d. Tagalog Expressions Pertaining to Mental Experience: Cognition and Emotion in a Western Austronesian Language. Unpublished ms.
Palmer, Gary, Heather Bennett and Les Stacey. (submitted). Emotion Concepts in Tagalog: An Analysis of Metaphorical and Metonymical Expressions. In Gary B. Palmer and Debra J. Occhi (eds), Languages of Sentiment: Pragmatic and Conceptual Approaches to Understanding Cultural Constructions of Emotional Substrates, submitted to John Benjamins.
Palmer, Gary B. and Rick Brown. 1998. The Ideology of Honor, Respect, and Emotion in Tagalog. In Angeliki Athanasiadou and Elzbieta Tabakowska (eds), Speaking of Emotions: Conceptualization and Expression. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 331-355.
Schachter, Paul and Fe T. Otanes. 1972. Tagalog Reference Grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schachter, Paul. 1987. "Tagalog". In Bernard Comrie (ed), The World's Major Languages. New York: Oxford University Press., 936-958.
Media Sources
KHANGKHUN GKHERRNITZ THE ALBUM. Parokya Ni Edgar: Backbeat. Pasig, Metro Manila. (audiotape)
Modern Heroes, Modern Slaves. 1998. Filmmakers Library. (videotape)
Paguio, Gil D. 1998. Hinagap ang Alitin. Quezon City: MALIK-MATA Publications.
Sana'y Maulit Muli. Regal Films. Star Cinema Productions, Inc. (videotape)
YANO. 1994. Yano. Produced by Yano & Poch Concepcion. Alpha Records Corporation. (audiotape)
Appendix I: Morphological Codes
aptv aptative mode (maka-, ma-)
agt agent trigger or focus (vb affixes -um-, m-, pag-, mag-, nag-; -um- is also a realis marker)
caus causative voice (pa-)
cond conditional (kung), i.e. if, when
conj conjunction (at, -'t)
drc directional particle (sa)
pronoun (akin, iyo, kaniya, amin, atin, inyo, kanila)
demonstrative (dito/dine, diyan, doon)
ex existential
excl exclusive (personal pronouns kami, namin, amin)
gen genitive
particles (ng, ni)
pronouns (ko, mo, niya, namin, natin, ninyo, nila)
demonstratives (nito/nire, niyan, niyon)
ger gerund (pag-)
incl inclusive (personal pronouns tayo, natin, atin)
inv inverse (ay)
irr irrealis mood (-in and absence of realis marking)
lig ligature (na or -ng)
loc locative trigger or focus (-an)
pl plural
pr proper noun marker (si, sina, ni, nino, kay, kina)
prnm proper name
prox proximate (ito, nito, dito)
prox2 near addressee (niyan, diyan, iyan)
real realis mood (-um-, n-, ni-, -in-); -um- conflates with AGT
rdp CV or V reduplication, often signifying incompletive aspect
rdp2 reduplication of root; attenuation
ref referential, corresponding to trigger or focus
particle (ang, si)
pronoun (ako, ka, ikaw..., siya, kami, tayo, kayo, sila)
demonstrative (ito/ire, iyan, yon)
rem remote demonstrative (niyon, noon, doon, iyon)
req request form (maki-, naki-, makiki-, nakiki-)
s singular
stat stative (ma-, na-, ka-)
supr superlative (pinaka-)
ug undergoer (vb prefix i-)
1,2,3 first, second, third person
> metaphorical or metonymical extension