In this week’s meeting of Phonology Circle, Anton Kukhto (MIT) will lead a discussion of Shih & Zuraw’s 2017 paper: Phonological conditions on variable adjective and noun word order in Tagalog. You can download the paper here.
Discussion leader: Anton Kukhto (MIT)
Paper: Shih, S. S., & Zuraw, K. (2017). Phonological conditions on variable adjective and noun word order in Tagalog. Language, 93(4), 317-352 (available here).
Time: Wednesday (4/17), 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 32-D831
Abstract:
Tagalog adjectives and nouns variably occur in two word orders, separated by an intermediary linker: adjective-linker-noun versus noun-linker-adjective. The linker has two phonologically conditioned surface forms, –ng and na. This article presents a large-scale corpus study of adjective/ noun order variation in Tagalog, focusing in particular on phonological conditions. Results show that word-order variation in adjective/noun pairs optimizes for phonological structure, abiding by phonotactic, syllabic, and morphophonological well-formedness preferences that are also found elsewhere in Tagalog grammar. The results indicate that surface phonological information is accessible for word-order choice.