Last updated 26 Nov 07
For more than a century it has been considered that Tagalog ang-phrases (ang + XP) are always referential, i.e. refer to a specific referent, a generic reading being an exception (Humboldt 1836-1839, Bloomfield 1917, Blake 1925, Ramos 1971, Schachter and Otañes 1972, Schachter 1976, 1977, 1995, Cena 1978, Himmelmann 1991, 2004, 2005, Kroeger 1993).
The purpose of this paper is to reexamine this hypothesis by looking at the spoken Tagalog corpus the present author has been building (approximately 37,000 words, 210 minutes at this stage). Our observations can be summarized as follows. First, ang-phrases can be either referential or non-referential, depending on how they are used. In the corpus, ang introduces [1] an identifiable referent, [2] a non-identifiable referent, [3] a subject of a specificational sentence, [4] a subject of a cleft sentence, [5] a parenthetical, and [6] an exclamatory expression. We analyze a variety of ang-phrases of types [3], [4], [5], and [6] as non-referential; there is no specific individual being referred to (cf. Givón 1978, Payne 1997). Instead, the subject of a specificational sentence and a cleft sentence represents a presupposed open proposition, whose value is specified by a noun in the predicate position (Declerck 1988, Lambrecht 1994, 2001); a parenthetical frames the following utterance in terms of quotation or epistemic attitude; and an exclamatory expression describes a psychological status of the speaker. The referentiality of ang-phrases is not determined prior to, but emerges through, the actual usage. Second, the non-referential uses are more frequent than the referential uses in the spoken corpus. Thus, the widely-accepted hypothesis on ang-phrases is not supported by their actual usage.
In this study, ang is also compared with its 'stylistic variant' yung, which is a grammaticalized form of the distal demonstrative pronoun iyon and linker -ng (Himmelmann 2005). It is observed that most identifiable referents are introduced by yung rather than ang in the spoken corpus. It suggests that the function of ang as a "definite article" is now being taken over by yung.
© 2007 Nori Nagaya
Last updated 26 Nov 07