PUZZLES IN TAGALOG INTONATION

In this talk, I will lay out some of the challenges in analyzing intonation in Tagalog. I propose a tentative model of Tagalog intonational phonology, which is limited by its inability to account for some of the patterns of Tagalog intonation. One striking apparent feature of Tagalog intonation is that there is a consistent tonal melody which shows variability in terms of its association to word level prominence. Sometimes tones ignore word level prominence and appear to demarcate phrasal boundaries, but occasionally, tones appear to target word level stress. This is typologically unusual, as languages tend to have one pattern or the other, and not alternate between the two possibilities. It’s not yet clear what conditions the variation in tonal alignment. The other interesting feature of Tagalog intonation that will be discussed is a pattern of downstep which marks the beginning of a new prosodic phrase. The downstep pattern, though robust, is not always present. It remains to be investigated whether the suspension of downstep is conditioned by information structure, such as focus and givenness, as has been
shown for other languages (e.g., Japanese).

WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT FORMING LINGUISTIC DEPENDENCIES IN REAL-TIME (AND WHAT REFLEXIVE PROCESSING IN TAGALOG CAN TELL US ABOUT IT)

In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of how we form linguistic dependencies in real-time, that is, as an utterance unfolds over time. I will then talk about what reflexive processing in Tagalog can add to what we know about real-time linguistic dependency formation. To this end, I will give a report on the visual world study that was conducted in the months of August 2023 and April 2024, and will describe the rationale for the current visual world study (data collection, ongoing). I conclude by outlining some future directions.