Structure of Tagalog Sentences

Structure of Tagalog Sentences

Tagalog, the basis of the national language in the Philippines which is Filipino, can be classified in the predicate argument structure (PAS) that is why this language is a free word order. By that, it means that the words in a sentence are interchangeable but the thoughts and meaning will not be affected by the alteration of the order. (Mistica and Baldwin, 2009)

For instance, Nagtapat ng pag-ibig ang lalaki sa babae can be interchanged to:

Nagtapat sa babae ng pag-ibig ang lalaki

Nagtapat sa babae ang lalaki ng pag-ibig

Nagtapat ang lalaki ng pag-ibig sa babae

Nagtapat ang lalaki sa babae ng pag-ibig.

The five sentences above resemble same thoughts: the guy told his feelings to the girl. There maybe more possible sentences that can be created through changing the position of the words but same old meaning. It is because the syntaxes exhibit voice marking which are possible in Austronesian languages like Tagalog. According to Paul Kroeger (1993), a morpho-syntactic phenomenon like what voice marking does gives prominence to an element in a sentence.

Sa in the above sentences indicate goals, recipients, and definite objects. It answers the question “to whom?” Ang on the other hand is used for pointing the doer of the action. It answers the question “who did?” while ng marks the possessors and indefinite object. It also answers the question “what?”

Because of those syntaxes (in our case: sa, ng, ang), interchanging the position of the words in a Tagalog sentence without altering the whole thought is possible.

In addition, I searched for the definition of argument structure and the search button said:

"Thus argument structure is an interface between the semantics and syntax of predicators (which we may take to be verbs in the general case)... Argument structure encodes lexical information about the number of arguments, their syntactic type, and their hierarchical organization necessary for the mapping to syntactic structure." (Bresnan 2001:304)

To make it brief, predicate argument structure makes the words in the Tagalog sentences be possibly interchangeable without altering the whole thought by using syntaxes that will give uses of the words and what they are stand for.

References:

Meladel Mistica and Timothy Baldwin. 2009. Recognising the Predicate-argument Structure of Tagalog. Proceedimgs of NAACL HLT 2009, pages 257-260, Boulder, Colorado.

Paul Kroeger. 1993. Phrase Structure and Grammatical Relations in Tagalog. CSLI

Publications, Stanford, USA.

Joan Bresnan. 2001. Lexical-functional syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.

DISCLAIMER: This is my Thai10 homework (and i'm looking forward to the promised trip) WAHOOO. Below is another assignment about Filipino language.

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All about Filipino

Filipino is the national language in the Philippine archipelago. It is officially recognized since the 1987 Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines have passed. Section 6 in this law states that:

“The national language of the Philippines is Filipino. As it evolves, it shall be further developed and enriched on the basis of existing Philippine and other languages.

Subject to provisions of law and as the Congress may deem appropriate, the Government shall take steps to initiate and sustain the use of Filipino as a medium of official communication and as language of instruction in the educational system.”

Filipino is often confused in Tagalog and Pilipino. One way of differentiating them from each other is on the date they were born. Tagalog is the basis of Pilipino and Filipino. It is the native language in Bulacan, Batangas, Rizal, laguna, Quezon, Cavite, Mindoro, Marinduque, some part of Nueva Ecija, Puerto Princesa and also Metro Manila. It is also the language that is spoken by the Tagalogs, one of the ethnolinguistic group in the country. It was finally recognized by the country when Late President Manuel Quezon, Ama ng Wika, promulgates a national language based on Tagalog on 30 December 1937 (Executive Order No. 134). (Constantino, 2009)

When Department Order No. 7 was passed by then Secretary Jose Romero of the Department of Education, Pilipino became the national language that began in 1959. This was stopped when the 1987 Constitution, as stated above, come to its way.

There was no Filipino before 1987 and there was no Pilipino before 1959. These two were based on Tagalog which belongs to Austronesia language of Malayo-Polynesian branch (Gordon, 2005) with a structure of predicate-argument (Mistica and Baldwin, 2009) and is a polysyllabic language. However, Filipino were not only based in one language but based on other languages in the Philippines including Spanish and English while Pilipino was not. Filipino is made up of 28 letters that includes the letters C, F, J, Ñ, NG, Q, V, X and Z (Perdon, 2008) while Tagalog do not. In other word, Filipino has wider set and collection of words than of Pilipino.

Based on Renato Perdon’s research (2008), the official dictionary issued in 1991 by the Commission on Filipino Language had about 55% of the words calculated into Filipino coming from the major dialects in the Philippines, namely: Bicol (301 words), Cebuano (526 words), Hiligaynon (564 words), Ilocano (122 words), Kapampangan (51 words), Pangasinan (82 words), Old Tagalog / Tagalog (8,463 words), and Samar-Leyte (459 words).

There are also 328 Tausug words, 222 words from the Maranao dialect, 99 words from Maguindanao, 23 words from Samal, 16 words from the Tingian, 12 words from Isneg and another 12 words from Tagbanua. (Perdon, 2008)

To brief the figures above, Filipino is the result of the combined and mixed words due to influenced of other languages. It is more Tag-lish friendly that allows you to use hyphenated Tagalog-English combinations or code shifting since Filipino citizens will combine English and Tagalog most of the time anyway.

Aside from the ability to adopt, this language doesn’t give much attention to gender. Pronouns used in this language do not classify females and males. This reflects the point of views of Filipinos who were valuing the equality of two opposite gender, the male and the female.

Filipino, or more preferably Tagalog,is loved by Jose Rizal saying that “ang hindi marunong magmahal sa sariling wika, mahigit sa hayop at malansang isda.” He compared the unfaithful Filipinos who don’t love our own language into a putrid fish. But, even though they knew it and compared to it, some tend to love other language especially English more than Filipino and that make me sad. I know it can’t be helped to learn more about English for competitiveness and skills but to forget Filipino is far more to it. They don’t know how to love our own language that once became the key of unity in the old times and so. They don’t think that the language is the soul of a country and the most powerful weapon for this can change the way of thinking of people. We must learn to love our own. Thai is for Thais. Japanese is for Japanese. Spanish is for Spaniards. Filipino is for Filipinos. We may know all the languages in the world but never forget what your native language is.

References:

Pamela Constantino. Tagalog / Pilipino / Filipino: Do they differ? Philippine Studies Emanila

Community, <http://emanila.com/philippines/2009/01/16/tagalog-pilipino-filipino-do-they-differ/>

Raymond Gordon, Jr. 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International,

Dallas, USA, 15^th edition

Meladel Mistica and Timothy Baldwin. 2009. Recognising the Predicate-argument

Structure of Tagalog. Proceedimgs of NAACL HLT 2009, pages 257-260, Boulder, Colorado.

Renato Perdon. The Making of a National Language. Philippine Studies Emanila Community, <http://emanila.com/philippines/2008/04/18/the-making-of-a- national- language/>