The D-Projection in Tagalog: Evidence from proper names

Abstract

All nominal arguments in Tagalog receive a proclitic marker that corresponds to certain syntactic and semantic properties, including definiteness. There is an active debate over whether these markers encode definiteness themselves or reflect syntactic positions associated with definiteness. I argue that the marking patterns and general distribution of referentially interpreted proper names in Tagalog show that their definiteness cannot be derived by syntactic position alone, and that some process internal to the nominal structure must be at work. I therefore propose that Tagalog is a DP language where proper names undergo N-to-D movement, and that the language's pre-nominal markers are expressions of features present at the D-projection.