Lexical categories and voice in Tagalog

The meaning and lexical category of so-called verbal roots is one aspect of the voice systems in Tagalog and other Philippine-type languages which has received little attention in the controversy surrounding the analysis of these systems. It is common to assume that these roots cannot occur without any affixation and that, therefore, they should be considered precategorial. Here it is shown that this view is ill-conceived. To begin with, it is possible to distinguish different classes of roots based on morphological features. Therefore, roots are not precategorial. Furthermore, a large majority of the putative verbal roots allows for unaffixed uses. However, ‘verbal roots’ have ‘non-verbal’ meanings when used without voice marking. Inasmuch as it can be shown that voice-marked forms have clearly ‘verbal’ meanings, it follows that voice marking is derivational (among many other things). The first part of the paper is taken up by the discussion of some basic issues regarding the nature of lexical and syntactic categories, which is a prerequisite to sorting out the Tagalog facts. Contrary to standard assumptions, it is proposed that a clear-cut distinction should be made between lexical and syntactic (i.e. phrasestructural) categories, allowing for mismatches between these two kinds of categorisations of lexical items.