Abstract
This paper outlines some facts of Tagalog prosody. The basic pitch excursions of Tagalog turn out to be remarkably similar to those of Irish, as described by Elfner (2012; 2015). After discussing in some detail the properties of Tagalog pitch rises and falls, and their sensitivity to the position of stress and of prosodic word boundaries, I make an observation about the interaction of word order with pitch peak height. It turns out that objects are generally higher-pitched than subjects would be in the same position, both in VOS and in VSO order; interestingly, this generalization is blind to the “Philippine-style voice” system, and makes reference only to thematic subjects and objects. I speculate that this generalization represents the Tagalog expression of nuclear stress: objects, no matter where they are in the Tagalog sentence, receive nuclear stress, realized as a heightened pitch peak.This article is part of Special Collection: Prosody and Constituent Structure
Highlights
1 Introduction This paper will be concerned with facts like those represented in the pitch track in Figure 1, from the Austronesian language Tagalog
Having outlined the basics of Tagalog prosody, I will turn to the effects of scrambling on pitch contour
After proposing that the distribution of pitch rises and falls in Tagalog may be captured by Elfner’s (2012; 2015) account of the prosody of Irish, I went on to try to define with some precision the placement of rises and falls in Tagalog
Summary
This paper will be concerned with facts like those represented in the pitch track in Figure 1, from the Austronesian language Tagalog.. In what follows I will outline the basics of the prosodic system If this generalization were exceptionless, we might seek to account for it in terms of something like the End-based theory of prosody developed in Selkirk (1986) and much subsequent work. Phrase in a clause, she argues, lacks a pitch rise, containing only a pitch fall This is unexpected under the End-based account sketched above, which leads Elfner to pursue an alternative. Further work on the prosodic systems of a variety of languages will hopefully make the overall picture clearer
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