Cross-serial dependencies in Tagalog

There are two salient linguistic uses of adjunction: for analyzing long-distance wh-movement (and related movement types) in many languages and for analyzing cross-serial dependencies (CSD) in Dutch and Swiss German. While the need for and the adequacy of adjunction to model wh-type movement have been questioned (Rambow and Vijay-Sbanker, 1998; Rambow et al., 2001), CSD seems ideally suited for a TAG analysis, since, as Shieber ( 1985) showed, CSD cannot be derived by a context-free grammar. In fact, some of the altemate tree rewriting systems proposed which do not include adjunction, such as the DSG of (Rambow et al., 2001}, cannot provide a satisfactory analysis of CSD, either: it is specifically the definition of adjunction as an tree-rewriting operation that inserts one tree in its entirety into the center of another that is crucial for deriving CSD. What is somewhat troubling, however, is that the construction appears tobe limited to two West Germanic languages/dialects, Dutch and Swiss Gennan. In this paper, we show that the same construction, though with different syntactic characteristics, is found in a completely unrelated language, Tagalog. We show how the analysis of Kroch and Santorini (1991) for Dutch can be adapted for Tagalog, and we show furthennore that the syntactic analysis suggested by TAG is preferable to an analysis based on head movement and verb insorporation.