Reversedang-inversion and narrow focus marking in Tagalog

Abstract

AbstractIn Tagalog, an argument that is in narrow focus can be fronted to the clause initial position, deviating from the default verb-initial word order. This so-calledang-inversion has been claimed to be obligatory (Nagaya, 2007) or at least the go-to strategy (Kaufman, 2005) of encoding narrow focus. There is, however, an alternative that has so far received little attention in the literature: reversedang-inversion. Structurally, this construction can be understood as the result of combining two inversion constructions:ang-inversion anday-inversion. As a consequence, the focal constituent appears at the end of the sentence rather than at the beginning.This article presents spoken data elicited during field work as well as written data on reversedang-inversion. Comparing the use of regular and reversedang-inversion indicates that discourse-structural considerations play an important role in construction choice between the two.