Examining voice choice in Tagalog: A corpus of web-based Tagalog

Abstract

This study is a corpus-based analysis of web-based Tagalog (Austronesian) investigating how different prominence features influence voice in basic, declarative, transitive clauses. A large sample of these structures were extracted from a web-based corpus of Tagalog. The arguments were annotated for animacy, definiteness, and other factors proposed to influence voice choice. Preliminary results suggest that despite the morphosyntactic symmetry in voice alternations in the language, the Undergoer voice appears to be the preferred structure regardless of these factors in Tagalog. Moreover, there may be highly constrained contexts in which the Actor Voice is used when describing two-participant, transitive events. This work has implications for how we understand the notion of prominence more generally and how languages might have specific requirements for the mappings between different prominence hierarchies.