The Subject in Philippine Languages: Topic, Actor, Actor-Topic, or None of The Above?

The status of subject and object as linguistic universals is commonly taken for granted. For example, the familiar typological classification of languages as SVO, SOV, etc., presupposes the universal occurrence of S’s and O’s, and this assumption is also implicit in such recent claims about linguistic universals as Keenan and Comrie’s (1972) accessibility hierarchy and the set of claims embodied in David Perlmutter and Paul Postal’s theory of relational grammar ( 1 ). The assumption in question, however, is less than obviously correct in the case of the languages of the Philippines. Students of Philippine languages, at any rate, have shown a disquieting indecisiveness or diffidence with regard to which, if any, of the sentence constituents that occur in these languages are appropriately identified as subjects and objects. Thus a recent paper ( McKaughan 1973 ) is largely devoted to a retraction of its author’s earlier usage of the term subject in his writings on Philippine languages in favor of a different usage for this term. And many grammatical descriptions of Philippine languages manage to avoid the subject-object terminology altogether.