Focus system and verb classification in Tagalog

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25884018
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Research Activity Start-up
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
• Principal Investigator: NAGAYA Naonori 東京外国語大学, 大学院総合国際学研究院, 講師 (20625727)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-08-30 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 言語類型論 / フィリピン諸語

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Tagalog and other Philippine languages are well known for their complex verbal morphology, often referred to as the focus system. This verbal morphology allows for deriving a variety of verb lexemes from a single verbal base. This project examined Tagalog morphosyntactic phenomena from a perspective of verb classification. The major finding of this project was that semantic classes of verbs play a significant role in analyzing voice phenomena, argument alternations, reduplication and repetition, motion expressions, and other linguistically important phenomena in this language.

Free Research Field

言語学