Focus and Constituent Order in Tagalog

Ever since Constantino’s (1965) study on the different sentence patterns of Philippine languages appeared, most of the studies regarding the sentence structure only dealt with the problem in pure syntactic terms. In fact, Constantino’s classic paper merely listed the different types of sentences that are found in the various Philippine languages. The most recent study on Tagalog gave an attempt on the derivations of the different sentence forms, but did not reason out why these sentence forms occur (Cena 1994). In this study, the assumptions of RRG are utilized in order to give an analysis based on the interface of syntax and pragmatics as seen in Tagalog. Assuming that focus structure affects the syntax, analyses of the different sentence forms in the language are given, in which the effect of the pragmatic factors in the syntax are clearly seen.