Some notes on Tagalog prosody and scrambling
Author(s)
Richards, Norvin W
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This paper outlines some facts of Tagalog prosody. The basic pitch excursions of Tagalog turn out to be remarkably similar to those of Irish, as described by Elfner (2012; 2015). After discussing in some detail the properties of Tagalog pitch rises and falls, and their sensitivity to the position of stress and of prosodic word boundaries, I make an observation about the interaction of word order with pitch peak height. It turns out that objects are generally higher-pitched than subjects would be in the same position, both in VOS and in VSO order; interestingly, this generalization is blind to the “Philippine-style voice” system, and makes reference only to thematic subjects and objects. I speculate that this generalization represents the Tagalog expression of nuclear stress: objects, no matter where they are in the Tagalog sentence, receive nuclear stress, realized as a heightened pitch peak.
Keywords: Tagalog; scrambling; prosody; Match Theory; nuclear stress; Irish
Date issued
2017-03Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and PhilosophyJournal
Glossa: a journal of general linguistics
Publisher
Ubiquity Press, Ltd.
Citation
Richards, Norvin. “Some Notes on Tagalog Prosody and Scrambling.” Glossa: a Journal of General Linguistics 2, 1 (March 24, 2017): 21 © 2017 The Author
Version: Final published version
ISSN
2397-1835