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This chapter focuses on grammatical relations. The very doubtful status of various kinds of ‘objects’ is recognized. Moreover, subjecthood, as traditionally understood, is not universal. Subjecthood depends on a hierarchy manifested by the sharing of morphosyntax between non-locative sources (agents) on the one hand, and absolutives in non-locative-source sentences (Bill felled the tree/The tree fell) on the other. Some languages lack such a pairing. For instance, some (e.g., Tagalog) show a grammatical relation that is not selected on the basis of a hierarchy of semantic relations; in others (such as Dyirbal) the absolutive rather than the source tops the hierarchy. These grammatical relations are routinizations (‘grammaticalized’), with diminished basis in semantics/pragmatics. However, they have a functional role in the syntax, e.g., as a reconstructible ‘empty slot’. Languages are not restricted to one system of grammatical relation, one kind of principal.

This chapter elaborates a more precise account of the phrasal morphology that is responsible for the appearance of special clitics, within an Optimality Theoretic framework. A limited set of constraint types suffice to describe these concisely and insightfully. The OT-based account of ‘Clitics as Phrasal Affixes’ is compared with a variety of other theories: those postulating a purely syntactic account of cliticization, and those locating the unusual properties of special clitics in their phonology or in other properties of the interface between syntax and other parts of grammar. The system of second-position clitics in Tagalog provides a complex and nuanced example displaying a number of the properties discussed to this point.

Chapter Two opens with an apparition tale that betokens a new representational capacity of Mary, especially as she is linked to the much revered and beloved figure of Inang Bayan (Mother Country). At a time when other ideologies of value associated with capitalist production emerged as a challenge to the economies of Imperial Christiandom, mestizo reformists wrote poetry and essays that cast their discontent with Spanish rule in an ambivalent allegory of maternal relations. Such reimaginings of the relationship between mother and child paved the way for a double translation that rendered “Filipino” (in the new national-cultural sense of the term) both the figure of the Virgin Mary and the global circulating concept of “motherland.”

This chapter uses overt morphological alternations in Malagasy and Tagalog – two Western Malayo-Polynesian languages – to probe issues concerning aspect (telicity) and argument structure. It argues that the telicity markers in these two languages can license the realization of an external argument which will be interpreted as CAUSE, and that this argument is merged into the structure in a syntactic position asymmetrically c-commanded by the merged position of the AGENT. Once this has been established, certain other conclusions can be drawn. For instance, theta-roles assigned in this manner are inherently different from theta-roles attached to the lexical entry of the root. Further, morpheme realization can be used to probe the argument structure of verbs that are less clear, and may vary from language to language, such as verbs of cognition.

This chapter proposes that an ergative language becomes split-ergative by a reanalysis of its antipassive construction as syntactically transitive. A split-ergative language then can evolve into an accusative language through the further reanalysis of transitive ergative clauses as passive. It illustrates this continuum with the ergative language Tagalog, the split-ergative languages Malagasy and Seediq, and the predominantly accusative standard Indonesian.

This chapter examines the limits of the nationalist language policy in the Philippines which is aimed at dislodging English from its privileged position in the controlling linguistic domains. Following the adoption of Filipino (a.k.a. Tagalog) as national language in the 1987 Constitution, the Philippines has witnessed a resurgence of nationalist rhetoric in defense of the privileging of one of the country's more than eighty languages as the de jure lingua franca. This chapter advocates the institution of English as sole official language of the country, even as it urges the maintenance of the vernaculars, including Tagalog, as an integral part of the Filipino people's multicultural heritage.

This chapter discusses Taglish as a lingua franca of the mass media. Tagalog serves as the language of commercially driven mass media, specifically radio, television, and film. As the lingua franca of the mass media, Tagalog manages in fact to have a translocal reach. It does so, however, only and always in conjunction with other translocal languages: English and Spanish. Thus, it is as another kind of language, Taglish, that Tagalog comes across as a lingua franca, providing the conditions for the emergence of a mass audience in the contemporary Philippines.

Richard Chu was the only son of the seven children of ethnic Chinese parents living in the Philippines. He details why his grandparents relocated in the Philippines in 1938, and discusses the various reasons for, and the constraints experienced by, Chinese in obtaining Filipino citizenship. Richard was raised by a Filipino nanny, so he was more fluent in Tagalog. However, his parents wanted all of their children to speak Hokkien. Richard details how his mother perceives Filipinos. He studied in an exclusive Catholic boys' school with a great reputation for academic excellence among the Chinese. Although Richard got increasingly assimilated into Filipino culture, he did not completely forget or abandon his Chinese heritage. He visited his relatives and ancestral home in China, and then shared his discoveries and feelings. Richard explains that one's identity is capable of being constructed, invented, or manipulated.

Arnold Zwicky has identified two kinds of clitics: Simple clitics and special clitics. A logically quite distinct dimension of cliticization is addressed in numerous studies that focus on elements such as the weak or conjunct pronominal forms of the Romance languages. The distinction between simple and special clitic elements implies two mutually exclusive dimensions of clitic behavior related to phonologyl and morphosyntax. Tagalog, a dialect of the Philippines, displays clitic elements with two different functions, each of which follows the first element of the sentence. This chapter, which examines the system of “second position” clitics in Tagalog, first provides an overview of the theory of second position before turning to the specific properties of the Tagalog clitics.

We briefly discuss a number of phenomena that illustrate potential consequences and extensions of the TTC. Partial and split control are only possible in logophoric complements, because predication as such only permits a unique, exhaustive saturator. The puzzling case of "Actor Control" in Tagalog, normally presented as evidence that control must apply to semantic representations, may be analyzed as syntactic "topic control". Finally, recent evidence for controlled pronouns and reflexives (in Hungarian, Spanish and Korean), surfacing with focal stress, imply that minimal pronouns such as PRO may be spelled out under special circumstances.

In this chapter, a variety of binding phenomena are used as diagnostics for properties of Tagalog syntax, including basic sentence structure and the nature of various kinds of movement. It is concluded that the consequences of Tagalog scrambling and ‘topicalization’ for binding, and the lack of a feeding relation between these two types of movement, can best be accounted for in a framework in which spell‐out to LF and PF need not be simultaneous.

This chapter presents a summary of Part IV of the study, which addressed the ‘binding theory’ from different perspectives. Topics covered include the issue of how to diagnose ‘anaphorhood’ and how important ‘locality’ is in this respect; whether we can account for binding condition B in syntax with the syntactic machinery available; and the use of binding theory as a diagnostic tool for one aspect of the syntax of Tagalog — the proper analysis of ‘topicalization’ — making use of the difference between Tagalog scrambling and topicalization.

This chapter traces how linguistic studies, which began as philology and as one technique with which to approach the ethnological puzzle of the Philippines, developed into a movement for orthographic reform to Filipino languages (most significantly, Tagalog). It considers the controversy that erupted in the Manila press when the new orthography was adopted and evaluates the political significance of the orthography: it masked the Spanish origins of Tagalog words. Such a specific application of a scholarly study was unusual among the sciences under study here; however, the vehemence with which it was taken up (and also opposed) shows the high political stakes of such scholarship.

This chapter investigates argument realization patterns in Tagalog and how they are influenced by the way Actor and Undergoer arguments are involved in the event expressed by the verb. In Tagalog, the nature of events, the properties of the participants involved, and the relation between them play a central role in the overall grammatical system. This chapter explores these influences on voice selection, voice restrictions, and changes in meaning and interpretation induced by Actor vs. Undergoer voice selection. While the voice affixes mark the prominence of an argument on a number of competing levels (Latrouite 2011), the present study focuses on the event-structural prominence of the subject. The chapter develops a notion of event-structural prominence, which will be used to explain seemingly surprising subject selection patterns as well as a number of meaning shifts observed with voice affixes.

This chapter examines the phonological rule of nasal substitution in Tagalog, specifically its rate of application in different constructions. Nasal substitution can occur whenever a prefix that ends in /ŋ/ attaches to a stem beginning with an obstruent, as in /maŋ + bigáj/ → [mamigáj] ‘to distribute’. Different prefixes trigger nasal substitution at different rates. This is similar to cases in which word-internal syntactic structure determines how and whether a phonological rule applies (e.g. Newell and Piggott 2014), but different because none of these words’ syntactic structure absolutely prevents nasal substitution, such as by placing a phase boundary between the prefix and stem. The focus of the chapter is on laying out the data, but it does suggest three possible interpretations: variable syntactic structure, a phonology directly sensitive to prefix identity, or competition between productive syntactic structure and lexicalized pronunciation.