Iconicity and Tense, Aspect, and Mood Morphology in Yami

This study aims to investigate the relationships between the forms and functions of the Tense-Aspect-Modality categories. Bybee’s hypothesis (1985) was tested against Yami data to discover how the categories of tense, aspect, and mood interact to support the iconicity hypothesis. The morphemic order and the degree of fusion are not arbitrary, in that the categories that most affect the meanings of the stems occur closest to the stem, whereas those that have least impact on the lexical meaning of the stem occur in the periphery. Greater semantic cohesion of concepts is reflected in a higher degree of fusion in their corresponding expression units. It was found that although the order of the functional categories follows Bybee’s iconicity principle, in that the valence affix is closest to the stem, while the aspect and modality markers are in the periphery, Bybee’s definition of terms is not entirely true of Yami and Philippine-type languages in general because there is a mixture of derivation and inflection in the Yami verbal system. The indicative focus affixes are ‘derivational’, but the non-indicative affixes are ‘inflectional’.