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
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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.
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