Morphological Optionality in Tagalog Aspectual Reduplication

Abstract

ing away from the details of Maclachlan’s specific account slightly, the function of pag is to mark transitivity, since it does not occur in the intuitively ‘passive’ (i.e. non-transitive) voice of theme topic, but does generally occur in the transitive voices. As such, it is best analyzed as the phonological exponent of the head of vP. Aside from their similar semantics of signifying external arguments, some additional support for the analysis of both pag and pa as heads of vP and for the ability to stack vPs comes from the fact that pag and pa may co-occur in both possible orders. (20) magpahintay papaghintayin cause to wait-AT (m-pag-pa-hintay) cause to wait-TT (pa-pag-hintayin) Stacked causatives, in which a causativized verb is further causativized by the addition of another pa morpheme, are also possible. (21) pakulo? papakulo? papapakulo? boil cause s.o. to boil s.th. cause s.o. to have s.o. boil s.th. (Maclachlan 1989) That verbal complex morphemes all head their own projections of vP rather than being inserted together in one head is clear from their ability to be separated from each other by the aspectual morpheme RED (Carrier 1979 argued similarly for boundaries between verbal morphemes in Tagalog). If all 10 Maclachlan does note exceptions to this generalization which, if pag is involved in case-marking, is surprising, since there should be no exceptions to the case filter or checking mechanisms. Within the framework of DM, however, the exceptions can be analyzed the result of idiosyncratic specification of these roots as belonging to a certain class, call it Class A. An exception like kuha ‘obtain’, which does not take pag with a transitive v, would simply be specified as belonging to this class which takes ∅ as the (idiosyncratic) exponent of intransitive v. This blocks insertion in this case of the more general pag.