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Article published In:
Usage-based and Typological Approaches to Linguistic Units
Edited by Tsuyoshi Ono, Ritva Laury and Ryoko Suzuki
[Studies in Language 43:2] 2019
► pp. 469–497
News from the field

Reversed ang-inversion and narrow focus marking in Tagalog

| Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf

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.

Keywords: Tagalog, information structure, focus, inversion constructions, fronting constructions, syntax-discourse interface
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
Published online: 13 November 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.18034.nuh
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Latrouite, Anja
2021. Specification predication: Unexpectedness and cleft constructions in Tagalog. Faits de Langues 52:1 ► pp. 227 ff. DOI logo

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