Putting the thing acted on in focus — and the four verb classes that fall out of it
Welcome to B1. The beginner course stopped at two ways of building a sentence: actor focus and object focus. That was enough to talk, but it left most of the Kapampangan verb system out of view.
This tier works through the rest, following Michael Forman's Kapampangan Grammar Notes (1971) — a reference grammar written from fieldwork, and the source this whole tier is built on.
Forman writes Kapampangan phonemically: stress is marked with an accent (ináus) and the glottal stop is written q (táliq). This course keeps the modern everyday orthography, so the same words appear here as inaus and tali.
If you go to the grammar itself — and you should, it is free — that is why the spellings look different.
Forman's term for what the beginner course called "object focus" is action-goal predication. He uses it when the goal of a transitive predication is definite.
verb with -an or i- + ing on the goal + ning on the agent, if it is expressed
Biklat neng David ing awang.
David opened the window.
| Piece | Job |
|---|---|
| Biklat | the verb — from the root buklat, "open" |
| ne | the fused pronoun, na + ya |
| -ng David | the agent, backgrounded |
| ing awang | the window — in focus |
king-marked phrases often sit alongside, usually carrying location or instrument:
Itiltil me ing asan keng aslam. — Dip the fish into the vinegar.
Ibili me reng mangga keng pulut. — Put the mangoes into the syrup.
The suffix -an is the commoner of the two. All of these are Forman's own examples:
Patdan me ing radio. — Turn off the radio.
Sebatan de ing dalan. — They barricaded the road.
Sakmalan me ing pale. — Grab a handful of the rice.
Sebulan ne ing ebun. — She scrambled the egg.
Tutuksuan do reng anak. — They are teasing the children.
Pupuntukan ne ing luklukan. — He is carrying the chair on his head.
Tikman ku na. — I've already tasted it.
Notice how much work the fused pronouns are doing. me, de, ne, do — every one of these sentences carries an agent and a goal welded into a single syllable. Beginner lesson 5 was not an ornament; it was preparation for this.
Here is where Kapampangan gets systematic in a way beginners are usually spared. When an -an verb moves into its completed form, two independent things may happen:
Cross those two and you get four classes:
| -an drops | -an survives | |
|---|---|---|
| no vowel change | List A aus, andam, ingat, buat, bili, dukit, tali |
List B ablas, albe, absang, arung, atian, urud, alila |
| vowel changes | List C buklat, gawa, dala, tuki, turu, tadtad, sali, kutang |
List D bastus, bayad, busbus, kumbira, bagut, balik, baril, dagdag |
The vowel changes are just two: u → i and a → e.
| Class | Root | Completed | In a sentence |
|---|---|---|---|
| A | aus (call) | inaus | Inaus ne i Tita. — He called Tita. |
| A | buat (lift) | binuat | Binuat neng Kinday ing salikap. — Kinday lifted the basket. |
| B | alila (change) | inalilan | Inalilan de. — They changed it. |
| C | buklat (open) | biklat (u→i) | Biklat neng David ing awang. |
| C | sali (buy) | seli (a→e) | Seli ku ini. — I bought this. |
| C | gawa (make) | gewa (a→e) | Gewa ye pu? — Did you make it, sir? |
| D | busbus (hole) | bisbusan (u→i, -an stays) | Bisbusan de ing bale. — They made holes in the house. |
| D | kumbira (invite) | kimbiran (u→i, -an stays) | Kimbiran da kayu. — You were invited by them. |
Beginner lesson 11 gave you sali → seli and gawa → gewa as "verbs that change their vowel," a list to memorise.
They are not a list. They are List C: the a → e change, with -an dropping. Once you know the four classes, a whole set of apparent irregularities becomes one rule with four settings.
Do not memorise the four lists. Nobody does. What pays is knowing that a strange-looking verb is probably a familiar root with a predictable change applied — so when you meet kimbiran, you go looking for kumbira rather than assuming a new word.
Lesson 5 turns that instinct into a method.
The prefix i- does the same job, and leans toward things moved, put or transferred:
Isara me ing pasbul. — Close the door.
Ibuklat me ing libru mu. — Open your book.
Ilaga mu reng ebun. — Boil the eggs.
Itais me ing palang. — Sharpen the bolo.
Compare Ibuklat me ing libru mu with Biklat neng David ing awang. Same root, buklat; two different goal-focus constructions. The choice is lexical — it belongs to the verb, not to the meaning you want.
Both -an and i- also show up in other predication types — beneficiary, instrumental, locative, referential. Which means the affix alone does not tell you what kind of predication you are looking at.
Forman is blunt about it: "it is sometimes difficult to determine unambiguously that a particular predication is action-goal focused rather than action-beneficiary or action-location. Considerable lexical-semantic-syntactic analysis remains to be done on the classification of verb roots."
That is a reference grammar saying we do not fully know yet. If you find yourself unable to classify a sentence with confidence, you may be in one of the genuinely unresolved cases rather than missing something obvious.
In practice you resolve it the way native speakers do: from the noun phrases and the situation. A sentence with a person in focus and a thing off to the side is probably beneficiary; one with the thing in focus is probably goal.
Write u to i or a to e.
How do I know whether a verb takes -an or i-? You learn it with the verb. There is a semantic tendency — i- for things moved or transferred — but it is a tendency, not a rule.
Do I need the four classes to speak? No. You need them to read, and to stop treating every derived form as a new word.
Is "action-goal" the same as "patient trigger"? Broadly yes. Forman's terminology and the voice terminology describe the same facts. This tier follows Forman because he is the source.
Goal focus is the most frequent construction in ordinary Kapampangan after actor focus, and the four verb classes are the key that turns a wall of unfamiliar verb forms into a small set of predictable transformations.
Next: Action-Beneficiary Predication — the construction that shares i- with this one and is the commonest thing to confuse it with.