Examining voice choice in Tagalog: A corpus of web-based Tagalog

Abstract

This study is a corpus-based analysis of web-based Tagalog (Austronesian) investigating how different prominence features influence voice in basic, declarative, transitive clauses. A large sample of these structures were extracted from a web-based corpus of Tagalog. The arguments were annotated for animacy, definiteness, and other factors proposed to influence voice choice. Preliminary results suggest that despite the morphosyntactic symmetry in voice alternations in the language, the Undergoer voice appears to be the preferred structure regardless of these factors in Tagalog. Moreover, there may be highly constrained contexts in which the Actor Voice is used when describing two-participant, transitive events. This work has implications for how we understand the notion of prominence more generally and how languages might have specific requirements for the mappings between different prominence hierarchies.

On the Overlooked Diversity of Clause Structures and Argument Structures in Non-Indo-European Languages

“…The different choices of Topic are not active-passive but simply different ways of profiling the event (Foley and Van Valin 1984, §4.3); there is no change in transitivity or markedness, and there is no "basic" form; all are derived, though frequency counts have shown a strong preference for the use of Undergoer Topic constructions (Adricula 2023), though it depends on genre (Longacre 1996). This system is similar to the choice of A construction vs. O construction in Jarawara (Dixon 2000(Dixon , 2004 depending on what is considered the topic of the clause, though Tagalog allows for many more choices for the Topic than Jarawara: actor Topic (8), patient Topic (9), conveyance Topic (a theme, a benefactive, or an instrument) (10), or locative Topic (a goal, source, or stative (essive) locative argument) (11).…”