Diphthongs

Palauan contains several diphthongs (sequences of vowels within a single syllable). A list of diphthongs and corresponding Palauan words containing them are given below, adapted from Zuraw (2003).

The extent to which it is accurate to characterize each of these vowel sequences as diphthongs has been a matter of debate, as in Wilson 1972, Flora 1974, Josephs 1975, and Zuraw 2003. Nevertheless, a number of the sequences above, such as /ui/, clearly behave as diphthongs given their interaction with other aspects of Palauan phonology like stress shift and vowel reduction. Others do not behave as clearly like monosyllabic diphthongs.

Pronouns

The following set of pronouns are the pronouns found in the Palauan language:^[8][9]

Noun inflection

Palauan nouns inflect based on humanness and number via the plural prefix re-, which attaches to plural human nouns (see Josephs 1975:43). For example, the word chad 'person' is a human noun that is unambiguously singular, whereas the noun rechad people is a human noun that is unambiguously plural. Non-human nouns do not display this distinction, e.g., the word for 'stone', bad, can denote either a singular 'stone' or multiple 'stones.'^[10]

Some possessed nouns in Palauan also inflect to agree with the person, number, and humanness of their possessors. For example, the unpossessed noun tebel means simply 'table,' whereas one of its possessed forms tebelek means 'my table.' Possessor agreement is always registered via the addition of a suffix to the noun (also triggering a shift in stress to the suffix). The possessor agreement suffixes have many different irregular forms that only attach to particular nouns, and they must be memorized on a noun-by-noun basis (Josephs 1997:96). However, there is a "default" e-set suffixes (see Josephs 1997:93 and Nuger 2016:28), shown below:

There are some morphophonological changes, often unpredictable, including: (Josephs 1997)

• Single vowels are reduced to /ə/, written as e (bad → bed·uk 'my stone'), or being syncopated entirely (ngikel → ngkel·el 'my fish'), with few nouns do not reduce their vowel (chim → chim·ak 'my hand')
• Double vowels are reduced to single vowels (deel → del·ek 'my nail'), sometimes reduced further to /ə/ (diil → del·ek) or even syncopated
• Due to syncopation, numerous complicated consonant clusters are produced, and some of them are simplified in Palauan (relm → lm·ek 'my water', tut → t·uk 'my breast')

Verb inflection

Palauan verb morphology is highly complex. menga(ng) 'eat', for example, may be analyzed as verb prefix me- + imperfective -ng- + kal, in which -kal is an archimorpheme that is only apparent from comparing various forms, e.g. kall 'food' and taking into consideration morphophonemic patterns: Ng milenga a ngikel a bilis 'the dog was eating fish' (lit. it VERB PREFIX-m eat-PAST INFIX-il- ARTICLE fish ARTICLE dog); Ng kma a ngikel a bilis 'The dog eats up fish' (lit. it-eat-PERFECTIVE-INFIX-m- fish ARTICLE dog). The verb system points to fossilized forms related to the Philippine languages.

Word order

The word order of Palauan is usually thought to be verb–object–subject (VOS), but this has been a matter of some debate in the linguistic literature.^[11] Those who accept the VOS analysis of Palauan word order generally treat Palauan as a pro-drop language with preverbal subject agreement morphemes, final pronominal subjects are deleted (or null).

Example 1: Ak milenga er a ringo pro. (means: 'I was eating the apple.')

In the preceding example, the abstract null pronoun pro is the subject 'I,' while the clause-initial ak is the first person singular subject agreement morpheme.

On the other hand, those who have analyzed Palauan as SVO necessarily reject the pro-drop analysis, instead analyzing the subject agreement morphemes as subject pronouns. In the preceding example, SVO-advocates assume that there is no pro and that the morpheme ak is simply an overt subject pronoun meaning 'I'. One potential problem with this analysis is that it fails to explain why overt (3rd person) subjects occur clause-finally in the presence of a co-referring 3rd person "subject pronoun" --- treating the subject pronouns as agreement morphemes circumvents this weakness. Consider the following example.

Example 2: Ng milenga er a ringngo a Satsuko. (means: 'Satsuko was eating the apple.')

Proponents of the SVO analysis must assume a shifting of the subject a Satsuko 'Satsuko' from clause-initial to clause-final position, a movement operation that has not received acceptance cross-linguistically, but see Josephs 1975 for discussion.