Syntactic features of Tagalog verbs

Abstract

Linguists have long faced the task of formulating comprehensive and yet accurate grammars. Before such grammars can be written for Philippine languages, certain basic features of verb structure must be investigated. This study investigates some of the syntactic features of Tagalog verbs as a step toward the formulation of a more comprehensive grammar than is currently available. The syntactic features as defined for this study are morphological, subcategorizational, and selectional. The first refers to the cooccurrence potential of verb stems with certain affixes which mark grammatial relations between the verb and its topic. The second set of features refers to cooccurrence restrictions between the verb and its various sentence complements. The third set of features refers to cooccurrence restrictions of a collocational nature between the verb and its complements. Thus, verbs are first examined for cooccurrence with a battery of nine affixes, which. mark four basic verbal construction types: Actor-focus, Goal-focus, Locative-focus, and Implicative-focus. Verbs are found to differ in respect to which voice affixes are permitted, and thus must be individually specified for what may be called the stem's focus index. Verbs are then examined for their cooccurrence with nominal sentence complements in the various focus constructions. They may be characterized in this respect by their syntactic cooccurrence with the basic sentence complements of topic, actor, object, and locative referent. Such sentence complements may be individually obligatory with certain verbs (+), excluded with others (-), and optional with others (+). Finally, verbs are examined for selectional restrictions which govern the cooccurrence of the particular items in the verb-topic relationship. Selectional features of verbs are developed in this study in a context-sensitive fashion, while nominals are described in a context-free fashion.