This Dictionary (Purulungan) of Waray-English and English-Waray words supplements grammar and syntax learning of the Waray language. There are more than 4,500 Waray words in nearly 10,000 terms defined in this Dictionary. Spanish-derived Waray words make 12% of borrowed terms, while a few come from English or American. This compilation of contemporary Waray vocabulary is the most current and comprehensive.
Learning Waray is a two-volume reference book. The first volume is a friendly introduction to the language's Austronesian origins and Spanish and English speakers' influences whose words became part of the lingua franca. The second volume, a Waray-English and English-Waray Dictionary (Purulungan), supplements the essential know-how providing common words needed to practice speaking and writing the language.
This book is about recurrent functions of applicative morphology not included in typologically-oriented definitions. Based on substantial cross-linguistic evidence, it challenges received wisdom on applicatives in several ways. First, in many of the surveyed languages, applicatives are the sole means to introduce a non-Actor semantic role into a clause. When there is an alternative way of expression, the applicative counterpart often has no valence-increasing effect on the targeted root. Second, applicative morphology can introduce constituents which are not syntactic objects and/or co-occur with obliques. Third, functions such as conveying aspectual nuances to the predicate (intensity, repetition, habituality) or its arguments (partitive P, highly individuated P), narrow-focusing constituents, and functioning as category-changing devices are attested in geographically distant and genetically unrelated languages. Further, this volume reveals that spatial-related morphology is prone to developing applicative functions in disparate languages and phyla. Finally, several contributions discuss the diachrony of applicative constructions and their (non-syntactic) attested functions, including a case of applicatives-in-the-making.
23 lessons introducing the Waray-Waray language spoken in the eastern Visayas region in the Philippines. These materials are in the public domain and available for free online. They are reprinted here for convenience.
The Philippines series of the PALI Language Texts, under the general editorship of Howard P. McKaughan, consists of lesson textbooks, grammars, and dictionaries for seven major Filipino languages.
