A Brief Syntactic Typology of Philippine Languages - Academia Sinica

Lawrence A. Reid and Hsiu-chuan Liao
identical to that which marks the Agents of transitive constructions, we choose to use
the more general term Genitive as the label for the case that marks both of these noun
phrases.
2. Word order of predicational constructions
Philippine clause structure is typically right branching; that is to say, heads of
constructions appear in initial position of a construction. In clausal constructions, this
means that the predicate occurs first, with nominal complements, adjuncts, and other
modifiers of the predicate typically occurring after the predicate. Clausal predicates may
be headed by one of a variety of form classes, nouns, prepositions, or verbs, each being
modifiable by the dependents normally allowed by these classes.
2.1 Nominal predicate clauses
Since Philippine languages do not typically utilize copula verbs, predicate nouns
constitute the head of nominal clauses. There are several types of such clauses, depending
on the modification (or lack thereof) of the predicate noun.
2.1.1 Classificational
Classificational nominal clauses are those in which the predicate classifies the
entity expressed in the Nominative noun phrase of the clause. The predicate noun is the
label of a class of objects of which the Nominative noun is an instance. The predicate
noun is typically a bare noun without a specifying determiner, and since it is a predicate,
is interpreted as the head of the predication.
436