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Phonological conditions on variable adjective and noun word order in Tagalog
- Language
- Linguistic Society of America
- Volume 93, Number 4, December 2017
- pp. e317-e352
- 10.1353/lan.2017.0075
- Article
- Additional Information
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Tagalog adjectives and nouns variably occur in two word orders, separated by an intermediary linker: adjective-linker-noun versus noun-linker-adjective. The linker has two phonologically conditioned surface forms, -ng and na. This article presents a large-scale corpus study of adjective/noun order variation in Tagalog, focusing in particular on phonological conditions. Results show that word-order variation in adjective/noun pairs optimizes for phonological structure, abiding by phonotactic, syllabic, and morphophonological well-formedness preferences that are also found elsewhere in Tagalog grammar. The results indicate that surface phonological information is accessible for word-order choice.