THE NOMINAL MARKING SYSTEM OF HILIGAYNON: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURES WITH ENGLISH

Abstract

This study examined the nominal marking system of Hiligaynon and compared it with the corresponding structures of English, with particular attention to determiners, demonstratives, and word order. Using a comparative descriptive design, the researchers analyzed a corpus of three published binalaybay (Hiligaynon narrative poems) presented with their English translations — “Father, Come Home—Leave Saudi” by Eugenio M. de Pablo, “Sugarcane Cutter” by George T. Calaor, and “Bukid sang Makiling” by Ma. Luisa Defante Gibraltar — sourced from Balay ni Juan, Bago City, with written permission from the copyright holders. Textual excerpts were coded and analyzed qualitatively for determiners, demonstratives, and syntactic ordering, and the resulting patterns were interpreted in light of Language Universals and Typological Variation Theory (Croft, 2020; Haspelmath, 2021) and Universal Grammar Theory (Chomsky, 2020). Findings showed that Hiligaynon relies on explicit case markers such as ang and sang to encode grammatical roles, which permits considerable freedom in word order without loss of clarity, whereas English depends on a comparatively fixed Subject-Verb-Object order and a closed class of determiners (the, a, an) to signal the same relationships. Hiligaynon demonstratives (ini, ina/sini, sadtong, yadtong) were found to carry an additional emotive and rhetorical function in binalaybay that is largely absent from their English counterparts (this, that, these, those). These differences illustrate how typologically distinct nominal-marking strategies — morphological case-marking versus positional syntax — shape both grammatical structure and literary expression. The study contributes to comparative Philippine linguistics, offers implications for bilingual language instruction and translation practice, and underscores the value of documenting Hiligaynon as part of broader language-preservation efforts.