Imperative Constructions in Marinduque Tagalog

This thesis investigates the morphosyntactic structure of imperatives in Marinduque Tagalog (MT), a regional dialect that retains the Proto-Central Philippine imperative paradigm. It examines four key grammatical areas essential to the expression of imperatives: within the verbal complex, it analyzes voice, modality, and aspect; at the syntactic interface, it explores the behavior of the subject pronoun that indexes the addressee. Together, these features characterize the grammatical conditions under which imperative constructions are formed and interpreted.

The study shows that: (1) the imperative voice system in MT, while largely intact, exhibits functional overlap and partial realignment in the distribution of its affixes; (2) imperative\ morphology interacts systematically with modal elements that modulate directive force; (3) imperatives in MT may be inflected for the prospective aspect, contrary to widely held typological claims; and (4) the obligatory omission of the subject pronoun is licensed by an inherent reference to a singular second person addressee encoded in the imperative morphology.

Although this study focuses on a single language variety, the findings have broader implications for other Central Philippine languages that employ the same paradigm. The patterns observed in the data also point to a possible developmental pathway that may underlie the attrition of these forms in other dialects of Tagalog.