An adverbial-to-verbal morpheme transfer in classical tagalog

Abstract

In any language, when the time lapse related to the past is equated with zero, whatever its actual value, the predicative verb turns into the ‘immediate past’, e.g. ‘He left a moment ago.’ → ‘he has just left Ø’. There is an additional feature in Tagalog: under the same conditions, the characteristic adverbial morpheme is transferred to the verb. Thus we have something like ‘He left [ ka- a few minutes ago].’ → ‘He [ ka- has just left] Ø.’ Since there are two series of adverbs: the one in ka- which is past-oriented and the other in sa- which is future-oriented, there are two immediate verbal forms. The one, in ka-, corresponds to the English immediate past. Surprisingly enough the other, in sa-, does not express the immediate future (He will do it soon.) but what might be called the ‘immediate present’: ‘He will do it [ sa- within a few minutes].’ → ‘He [ sa- suddenly does it] Ø.’ This observation leads to the conclusion that when the quantifier in the temporal adverbial is nil, another temporal item is moved from the temporal adverbial to the predicative verb. This phenomenon is visible in Tagalog where the temporal item moved is reflected as a morph. It is deemed to take place in all languages, even when it is not reflected in any phonological form, and could be integrated into the move-α principle of Chomsky's universal grammar.