An Interpretation of Nominative Arguments, Voice-Affixes and Verb Stems in Tagalog

In Tagalog each verb stem v can combine with a certain number of voice affixes(VA). Traditionally, these affixes (actor voice affixes: ‘um-’, ‘mag-’; objective voice affixes: ‘-in’, ‘-an’, ‘i-’) have been said to identify the semantic role of the nominative argument (subject) of the sentence. Yet, as data taken from English 1997 show, they determine the aspectual interpretation of the verb.These aspectual phenomena cannot be derived from the voice affixes‘ characterization in terms of semantic role as shown in Latrouite 1998 and Ramos 1971. First, in many cases the interpretation of the sentence depends on the V A with which the verb combines. E.g., affixation of the Goal voice affix (GV)‘-in’ to the stem /kain/ (‘eat’) in (1:1) requires the object eaten (i.e. the fish) to be completely consumed, affixation of the locative voice affix (LV) ‘-an’ yields apartitive reading, (1:3), whereas for the Actor voice affix (AV) ‘um-’ either of the two interpretations is possible, (1:1).