A description of nominal phrases in Paranan

Paranan belongs to the Northeastern Luzon language family and is spoken by around 16,000 people most of whom live in the coastal municipality of Palanan in Isabela Province. Despite the number of speakers, the language is one of the less documented languages in the Philippines. This paper addresses this gap by describing the structure of nominal phrases in Paranan. Using a corpus of 113,000 words from written and spoken Paranan texts, the paper describes the nominal marking system and structure of nominals in Paranan. Paranan has two primary nominal markers: determiners and demonstratives. Pluralization in Paranan is marked by the use of the plural marker hidi, which may either be postnominal or prenominal. Besides gender, properties of common nouns, and borrowed nouns, Paranan has at least seven types of derived nouns. Other aspects of Paranan grammar warrant further investigation.