Distinguishing nouns and verbs: A Tagalog case study

摘要

Many standard tests for identifying syntactic category, such as distribution and morphological potential, fail to distinguish between nouns and verbs in Tagalog. This state of affairs has led some scholars to propose that Tagalog does not treat verbs as a separate syntactic category from nouns. One such proposal by Kaufman (2009) further argues that adopting this so-called nominalist view of Tagalog allows us to straightforwardly understand a number of facts about the syntax of this language that have so far resisted consensus in analysis. This paper argues that the nominalist view cannot be maintained for Tagalog by showing differential behavior between nominal and verbal constituents in this language. It will furthermore be argued that the nominal behavior exhibited by verbal constituents can be attributed to a pervasive process of nominalization, broadly construed, neutralizing the aforementioned differential behavior. The result of this neutralization is reminiscent of phenomena found in other languages, and raises interesting questions regarding the range of nominalization processes observed cross-linguistically.