Naonori Nagaya

In the typological literature, a distinction is often drawn between reduplication (as a morphological process) and repetition (as a syntactic process) (Gil 2005). This squib reconsiders this distinction from the perspective of Construction Morphology (Booij 2010, 2018; Masini and Audring 2019). Drawing upon previously understudied phenomena in Tagalog, an Austronesian language of the Philippines, this paper demonstrates that the Construction Morphology approach provides a suitable framework for analyzing reduplication and repetition. It makes it possible to account for both similarities and differences between reduplication and repetition: both processes create a lexical unit with an iterative form and a conventionalized meaning, although they differ in the size and complexity of the lexical unit they create. Furthermore, this paper makes a strong case for the basic tenets of constructionist approaches, including a hierarchical lexicon and a lexicon-grammar continuum.

This paper investigates "directionals" or geocentric spatial terms in Lamaholot, examining the interaction between directionals, topographic environment, and cultural construals of landscape. Lamaholot is an Austronesian language of eastern Indonesia spoken on the volcanic island of Flores. The Lewotobi dialect, with which this paper is concerned, is spoken on the coastal area between Mt. Lewotobi and the Solor Sea. Reflective of this topographic environment, this language has "directionals" or grammatical terms defined with respect to landmarks: rae 'mountainward', lau 'seaward', wəli 'parallel with the coast', teti 'upward', and lali 'downward'. After describing how the spatial orientation represented by directionals is embedded in linguistic and sociocultural practices in Lamaholot-speaking communities, this paper shows that directionals exhibit intriguing diversity in interpretation and morphosyntax: they constitute a coordinate system for geocentric frame of reference, refer to different directions depending on different construals of landscape, and can appear in various syntactic positions. It is argued that this diversity can be understood in terms of a complex interplay of topographic environment, sociocultural practices, language uses, and linguistic repertoire, as assumed in the Sociotopographic Model (Palmer, Bill, Jonathon Lum, Jonathan Schlossberg & Alice Gaby. 2017. How does the environment shape spatial language? Evidence for sociotopography. Linguistic Typology 21(3). 457-491). Thus, the directional system in Lamaholot makes a strong case for a sociotopographic approach to spatial language.

This paper presents an analysis of the Tagalog "G-word" ludling and addresses its implications in Tagalog phonology. It is shown that the G-word ludling is best analyzed as an iterative infixal ludling, where the sequence of-Vg-is inserted after every onset, rather than infixation of-gV-. Crucially, the G-word ludling reveals constraints on Tagalog phonology that otherwise would be difficult to observe: *C1VC1V, hiatus avoidance, and iambic stress. Furthermore, our analysis of the G-words raises an important issue in Tagalog phonology: the possible emergence of the disyllabic "perfect prosodic word" in the G-words. Taken together, this paper offers another case study supporting the important role that ludlings play in phonological theory.

The NINJAL project on Motion Event Descriptions Across Languages (MEDAL) is a collab-orative research project on crosslinguistic and intralinguistic variations in motion event descriptions. One of the purposes of this project is to investigate how Path of motion is coded across languages by conducting a video-based production experiment. This paper reports the results of Experiment C undertaken on Turkish, an allegedly prime example of a verb-framed language.

It has been repeatedly proposed in one way or another that there are intriguing similarities between wa-marked topic NPs in Japanese and ang-marked topic (or nominative) NPs in Tagalog and other Philippine languages (Shibatani 1988, 1991, Katagiri 2004, 2006). The key observation here is that Tagalog ang-marked topic NPs are not allowed in exclamative, meteorological, or existential constructions, where it is also not possible to use Japanese wa-marked topic NPs. More recently, Santiago (2013) proposed that the distribution of topic NPs in Tagalog can be accounted for in terms of the thetic/ categorical distinction (Kuroda 1972). In this paper, I carry out a contrastive analysis of Tagalog topic NPs and Japanese topic NPs and challenge this hypothesis about the parallelism between Tagalog and Japanese. By reexamining the data already discussed in the literature and introducing additional sets of facts, it will be shown that: in Tagalog (i) non-topic-marking in allegedly thetic constructions can be explained by means of language-particular factors such as historical sources, (ii) topic NPs can appear in thetic sentences, and (iii) topic-marking is optional in some categorical sentences. Taken together, the above mentioned similarities between Tagalog and Japanese are shown to be superficial and coincidental. The contrast between thetic and categorical judgments realized in Japanese is not a good predictor of the occurrence or non-occurrence of topic NPs in Tagalog.*

In this paper, we look into the interaction between focus and prosody in Tagalog. In this language, for most focus conditions regular correspondences between syntax and information structure are observed: canonical constructions are used for sentence focus and predicate focus conditions, while pseudocleft constructions are used for argument focus conditions. However, some wh-questions, in particular targeting non-agent arguments, can be answered by means of canonical constructions as well as pseudocleft constructions. In this experimental study, we examine production data in order to test how Tagalog speakers prosodically distinguish canonical sentences associated with different focus structures. The results reveal that F0 cues and intensity consistently differentiate focused conditions from all-old utterances throughout the entire sentence. However, the distinct focus conditions are not prosodically differentiated. As for the argument focus condition, there may be dura-tional effects applying to the phrase in narrow focus, but this needs further confirmation.

This paper reports on a recently developed use of nominalizations with yung in Tagalog, namely, the use of yung-nominalizations in sentences such as Yung lumingon ka pero hindi naman ikaw ang tinatawag ‘That moment when you look back and realize that it was not you who were called’. This is a stand-alone event nominalization, where a whole sentence is nominalized and the resulting nominalization is used as a main clause. It cannot only describe an event but also convey the speaker’s emotion and attitude toward the event described, such as embarrassment and sarcasm. While this new use of yung-nominalizations has not yet been documented, it is widely observed on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. In this paper, I will offer a preliminary description and analysis of this emerging use of yung.

Lamaholot is a Central Malayo-Polynesian language of eastern Indonesia and is spoken in the eastern part of Flores Island and neighboring islands. The Lewotobi dialect of this language has two kinds of verb alternations of theoretical interest: the ditransitive and the benefactive alternations. On the one hand, verbs of transferring ownership such as neĩ ‘give’ can appear in both prepositional recipient and ditransitive constructions. The alternation held between the two construction types is referred to here as the ditransitive alternation. On the other hand, certain verbs of transaction and service such as hope ‘buy’ can be involved in the benefactive alternation, which is observed between benefactive serial verb and benefactive constructions.The purpose of this paper is to provide the description and analysis of the ditransitive and the benefactive alternations in light of recent studies of ditransitive and benefactive constructions (Kittilä 2005; Malchukov, Haspelmath & Comrie 2010, to name a few).

This paper analyses voice and grammatical relations in Lamaholot (eastern Indonesia) in light of the typologies of voice systems in western Austronesian languages. In the literature, languages of eastern Indonesia are assumed either not to display any grammaticized voice contrasts, or to show asymmetrical voice alternations if they do. However, this literature does not take Lamaholot into account. On the one hand, this language does display various conceptual voice contrasts, such as antipassive, anticausative, and middle, by means of the transitivity alternation, addition of prepositional elements, and other periphrastic strategies. On the other hand, there are also construction types differentiated by word order for different pragmatic requirements: the Subject-Topic and the Object-Topic constructions, the ditransitive alternation, and the benefactive alternation are all used to express the same conceptual content with different arguments highlighted for pragmatic purposes. These alternations essentially perform the same syntactic/pragmatic function as the focus system in Philippine languages. Therefore, the data and analyses presented here as well as the diversity shown in the growing literature on eastern Indonesian languages call for a more comprehensive and systematic typology of western Austronesian voice systems. At the very least, it is too early to conclude that eastern Indonesian languages lack voice alternations.

In the literature of Philippine linguistics, Goal-Focus (GF) constructions in Tagalog have been generally considered as transitive, both syntactically and semantically; however, whether Actor-Focus (AF) constructions should be analyzed as syntactically transitive or intransitive is controversial. This paper addresses the question of the syntactic transitivity of Tagalog AF constructions from a new perspective. We argue two points in this paper. First, AF constructions do not form a homogenous construction type but rather consist of both syntactically and semantically varying construction types: ambient, agentive, patientive, reflexive, and antipassive types. Moreover, AF construction types other than antipassive are clearly intransitive. This means that only antipassive AF constructions should be examined in a discussion of the syntactic transitivity of AF constructions. Second, it is argued that antipassive AF constructions are syntactically intransitive; specifically, in this construction type, nominative agent NPs behave like grammatical arguments of GF constructions, but genitive patient NPs do not. It is concluded that Tagalog AF constructions are best analyzed as syntactically intransitive.

In this paper, we look into expansion and spread of non-referential uses in articles in Philippine languages with special attention to two competing articles, ang and yung, in Tagalog. There are four claims we make in this paper. First, the functions of ang-marked nominals have been expanding from referential to non-referential uses. Second, yung is emerging as an article for referential nominals, taking over and expanding the referential uses of ang. Third, there is an emerging semantic distinction between ang and yung in spoken discourse: ang is for non-referential uses and yung for referential ones. Lastly, in other Philippine languages, as well, there is evidence of an existing article obtaining non-referential uses and a newer article emerging for referential nominals.

In this paper, I present a preliminary analysis of the phonology of the Lewotobi dialect of Lamaholot (Central Malayo-Polynesian, eastern Indonesia), including phonemes, allophones, phonotactics, syllable structures, stress placement, and morphophonemic processes. I also argue that the Lewotobi dialect differs from the neighboring Lamaholot dialects with regard to at least three features. First, [ʋ] appears in the positions where [w], [v], or [f] occurs in other dialects. Second, this dialect only allows open syllables, with the exception that the glottal stop can occur as a word-final coda. Third, /a/ is raised to [ə] either when nasalized or before a nasalized vowel. The description and analysis presented here are entirely based on a database of approximately 1,000 words collected through my fieldwork.

The current approaches to the Tagalog focus system attach too much importance to syntactic transitivity, and leave unanswered the question of how the focus system correlates with voice phenomena, thereby failing to elucidate its functional aspects. In this paper, we address this question by examining the middle voice and related voice phenomena in this language. Adopting the conceptual framework for voice phenomena (Shibatani 2006), we claim that Goal Focus (GF) verb forms express active situations, whereas Actor Focus (AF) verb forms represent two different non-active situations, namely, middle situations with introverted verbs and antipassive situations with extroverted verbs. AF verb forms also work for actor nominalization. We argue that these two functions of AF verb forms, non-active voice categories and actor nominalization, stem from their primary function, namely, actor-focusing.

The goal of this paper is to spell out the way syntax and pragmatics interact with each other inside and outside the clause in Tagalog. Inside the clause, different constructions are employed to express different types of focus structure: a canonical construction for predicate focus and sentence focus, a cleft construction for argument narrow focus, and a fronting construction for adjunct narrow focus. In every case the clause-initial position is included in the actual focus domain. Outside the clause, on the other hand, a topical/presupposed element is optionally preposed to the sentence-initial position called the left-detached position. It will be shown that this sentence-initial position is clearly distinguished from the clause-initial position. The traditionally recognized contrast between sentence and clause is indisputable and unequivocal in this language.

In this paper, I will argue that Tagalog has a preferred pattern of referential expressions for retrievable referents, and that the pattern is conditioned by the person and topicality hierarchies. Speech act participants are likely to be encoded by a personal pronoun. In contrast, third person topics tend to be referred to by a personal pronoun, and third person nontopics either by zero anaphora or by a demonstrative pronoun. This selection pattern is similar to, but different from, those in other familiar languages. Tagalog has its own pattern of referential expressions. I will also demonstrate that this conventionalized pattern of referential expressions involves voice phenomena and reference-tracking.