On March 28th, current graduate student Gérard Avelino gave an invited talk “The case of Tagalog case” as part of the Johns Hopkins Cognitive Science Department’s Early Career Colloquium series.
Abstract:
In this talk, I revisit the longstanding debate on the nature of the Philippine-type morphosyntactic alignment system, often also referred to as “Austronesian voice”. This system is typologically unique in tracking a privileged argument (the “pivot”) through affixes on the verb rather than relying solely on nominal case marking or word order. The literature has long been divided on whether Tagalog, a prototypical language of this type, exhibits an ergative pattern (Aldridge 2004, a.o.) or an accusative one. I argue for the latter approach, building on previous works (Richards 2000, Rackowski 2002, Chen 2017, Hsieh 2020, a.o.) while introducing novel evidence from previously under-analyzed ditransitive constructions with a focus on noncanonical constructions and speaker variation. I propose that Tagalog verbal “voice” morphology is better analyzed as an agreement system that tracks the Case of an internal topic, a consequence of the limited exponence of nominal Case marking in the language.
Crucially, I integrate Dependent Case Theory (Marantz 1991, Baker 2015) into the analysis of Tagalog verbal morphosyntax, showing that case competition plays a central role in argument realization, i.e., how a verb’s lexical semantics determines the syntactic expression of its arguments. A detailed investigation of asymmetries between obligatory and non-obligatory ditransitives reveals how the presence or absence of lexical dative case assignment interacts with dependent case computation across different verbal domains, explaining why certain theme arguments do not receive their expected accusative case. This framework also accounts for systematic speaker variation in causatives, benefactives, and other less commonly studied constructions where competing structural positions for arguments lead to predictable differences in verbal morphology depending on the pivot. I supplement the Tagalog data with comparative evidence from other Philippine-type languages to show how these case-sensitive patterns exist throughout Austronesian. In particular, I touch on the case of Tboli, an indigenous language of Southern Mindanao, which shows case agreement despite its rigid word order.
These findings not only contribute to our understanding of how languages employ morphosyntactic tools to disambiguate argument roles but also demonstrate the value of examining noncanonical data in theoretical analysis.