The role of information structure for morphosyntactic choices in Tagalog

In this paper we investigate the influence of two information structure (IS) related aspects on the choice of voice form and sentence structure by Tagalog speakers. The first is the information status of argument referents. Tagalog is a multiple voice language, so almost every semantic argument in a sentence can be turned into the privileged syntactic argument (or subject) and be rendered salient. Information status of the undergoer has been argued to play an important role in voice and subject selection. The second IS-related aspect is the inherent structure of a discourse as determined by the implicit questions under discussion (QUDs) that are answered with each subsequent sentence in a text. The default sentence in Tagalog starts with a verb. Inversion constructions, i.e. sentences that start with an argument phrase instead of a verb, are described as motivated by information structure considerations such as focus-background or contrastive-topic-focus packaging. Based on a novel QUD approach, we will work out the discourse structure and at-issue contents of five short texts and show the important role of implicit QUDs and parallelisms on the choice of voice and constituent order.