News from the field
Reversed ang-inversion and narrow focus marking in
Tagalog
In Tagalog, an argument that is in narrow focus can be fronted
to the clause initial position, deviating from the default verb-initial word
order. This so-called ang-inversion has been claimed to be
obligatory (Nagaya, 2007) or at least
the go-to strategy (Kaufman, 2005) of
encoding narrow focus. There is, however, an alternative that has so far
received little attention in the literature: reversed
ang-inversion. Structurally, this construction can be
understood as the result of combining two inversion constructions:
ang-inversion and ay-inversion. As a
consequence, the focal constituent appears at the end of the sentence rather
than at the beginning.
This article presents spoken data elicited during field work as
well as written data on reversed ang-inversion. Comparing the
use of regular and reversed ang-inversion indicates that
discourse-structural considerations play an important role in construction
choice between the two.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Information-structural notions
- 3.Inversion constructions and narrow focus in Tagalog
- 3.1
Ang-inversion
- 3.2Adjunct inversion
- 3.3
Ay-inversion
- 3.4Reversed ang-inversion
- 4.Use of reversed ang-inversion
- 4.1Spoken data: QUIS Fairy Tale and Frog Stories
- QUIS Fairy Tale
- Frog Stories
- 4.2Written data: The Hunger Games corpus
- 5.Summary and outlook
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
List of glosses
-
References
References
Collins, Suzanne
2008 The Hunger Games. Scholastic.
Collins, Suzanne
2009 Catching Fire. Scholastic.
Collins, Suzanne
2010 Mockingjay. Scholastic.
Collins, Suzanne
2012a Catching Fire (Filipino edition). Quezon City: Precious Pages Corporation.
Collins, Suzanne
2012b The Hunger Games (Filipino edition). Quezon City: Precious Pages Corporation.
Collins, Suzanne
2013 Mockingjay. Quezon City: Precious Pages Corporation.
Declerck, Renaat
1984 The pragmatics of it-clefts and wh-clefts.
Lingua 64(4). 251–289.
Dery, Jeruen E.
2007 Pragmatic focus and word order variation in
Tagalog.
Language and Linguistics 8(1). 373–402.
Frascarelli, Mara & Francesca Ramaglia
2009 (Pseudo)cleft constructions at the interfaces. Manuscript. lingbuzz/000841 (2018–
01–
02).
[URL]
Gundel, Jeanette K.
1988 Universals of topic-comment structure. In
M. Hammond,
E. Moravcsik &
J. Wirth (eds.),
Studies in linguistic typology, 209–239. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Kaufman, Daniel
2005 Aspects of pragmatic focus in Tagalog. In
I. Wayan Arka &
Malcolm Ross (eds.),
The many faces of Austronesian voice systems: some new empirical
studies, 175–196. Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU.
Kroeger, Paul
1991 Phrase structure and grammatical relations in
Tagalog: Stanford University dissertation.
Lambrecht, Knud
1986 Topic, focus and the grammar of spoken French: University of California, Berkeley dissertation.
Lambrecht, Knud
1987 Sentence focus, information structure, and the thetic-categorical
distinction. In
Proceedings of the 13th annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, vol. 131, 366–382. Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Lambrecht, Knud
1994 Information structure and sentence form. Cambridge University Press.
Latrouite, Anja
2019 Specification Predication, Unexpectedness and Cleft-Constructions in Tagalog. Manuscript currently under review.
Latrouite, Anja & Arndt Riester
2018 The role of information structure for morphosyntactic choices in
Tagalog.
Riesberg, Sonja & Shiohara, Asako. Information Structure in
Austronesian Languages. Berlin: Language Science Press. 1–47. (in press).
Latrouite, Anja & Robert D. Van Valin, Jr.
to appear.
A Role and Reference Grammar account of aspects of the
information structure-syntax interface in Tagalog. In
Koen van Hooste,
Anja Latrouite &
Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. eds.
Proceedings of the 2015 Role and Reference Grammar conference in preparation
Lee, Eun Hee & Mitsuaki Shimojo
2016 Mismatch of topic between Japanese and Korean.
Journal of East Asian Linguistics 25(1). 81–112.
Lovestrand, Joseph
2018 The background marker ná in Barayin.
Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 39(1). 1–39.
Mayer, Mercer
1967 A boy, a dog and a frog. New York: Dial Press.
Mayer, Mercer
1969 Frog, where are you? New York: Dial Press.
Mayer, Mercer
1971 A boy, a dog, a frog and a friend. New York: Dial Press.
Nagaya, Naonori
2006a Preferred referential expressions in Tagalog.
Tokyo University Linguistics Papers 251. 83–106.
Nagaya, Naonori
2006b Topicality and reference-tracking in Tagalog. In
9th philippine linguistics congress. Quezon City: University of the
philippines diliman, Citeseer.
Nagaya, Naonori
2007 Information structure and constituent order in
Tagalog.
Language and Linguistics 8(1). 343–372.
Schachter, Paul & Fe T. Otanes
1972 Tagalog reference grammar. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
Shimojo, Mitsuaki & Hye-Won Choi
2000 On asymmetry in topic marking-the case of Japanese wa and Korean
nun. In
Akira Okrent &
John P. Boyle (eds.),
Chicago linguistic society, vol. 36 1, 455–467.
Simons, Gary F. & Charles D. Fennig
2018 Ethnologue: Languages of the world, twenty-first edition, online version (last visited: 2018-03-22).
[URL]
Skopeteas, Stavros, Ines Fiedler, Samantha Hellmuth, Anne Schwarz, Ruben Stoel, Gisbert Fanselow, Caroline Féry & Manfred Krifka
2006 Questionnaire on information structure (QUIS): Reference manual, vol. 41. Universitätsverlag Potsdam.
Van Valin, Robert D., Jr.
2005 Exploring the syntax-semantics interface. Cambridge University Press.
Van Valin, Robert D., Jr. & Randy J. LaPolla
1997 Syntax: Structure, meaning, and function. Cambridge University Press.
Ward, Gregory & Betty J. Birner
2011 Discourse effects of word order variation. In
Claudia Maienborn,
Klaus von Heusinger &
Paul Portner (eds.),
Semantics: An international handbook of natural language and
meaning, vol. 33 2, 1934–1963. Berlin/Boston: Mouton de Gruyter.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Latrouite, Anja
2021.
Specification predication: Unexpectedness and cleft constructions in Tagalog.
Faits de Langues 52:1
► pp. 227 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.