On Some Ways to Test Tagalog Nominalism from a Crosslinguistic Perspective

Daniel Kaufman's core proposal is that much of what is typologically special about Tagalog syntax is rooted in the language having nouns but not verbs as its core lexical categories. He sees this at two levels. First, bare roots in Tagalog are nominal rather than verbal; for example, bili on its own means 'price bought for' rather than 'buy'. Second, he claims that fully inflected " verbs " in Tagalog are also really nouns; they are nouns that refer to the various participants in an event, as formations like employer and employee do in English. Thus, a form like bum -ili should be literally glossed as 'buyer', while bin -ili should be glossed as 'bought-thing'. From this hypothesis, Kaufman derives certain other distinctive features of Tagalog syntax—notably the fact that only subjects/topics can be extracted in this language, from the fact that NPs (unlike VPs) are often islands to extraction in languages of the world. This is an intriguing, somewhat radical, and potentially elegant proposal. As Kaufman himself points out, it falls squarely within a broader class of proposals, which have been investigated off and on for many years within different descriptive traditions. These proposals share the idea that one source of the differences among languages is differences in their stocks of lexical categories. Such proposals need to face a certain built-in challenge in order to be sustained. They need to be developed within a crosslinguistically valid theory of the lexical categories in order to be meaningful. For example, saying that English has a noun/verb distinction and Tagalog does not seems to presuppose that there is a universally valid sense of noun and verb that is in principle applicable to both languages. This is especially true of Kaufman's version, because he says not merely that the noun-verb distinction is neutralized in Tagalog, but that it is neutralized in favor of the nominal categories: the language has words comparable to nouns in English, not words comparable to verbs in English, nor words that have the grammatical properties of both. I commend Kaufman for developing his view in this way. I think that if there are interesting and meaningful parameters in this domain, they must be of this type. But one cannot make an argument that Tagalog has nouns but not verbs purely internal to Tagalog. Within Tagalog one might manage to show that there are no significant differences in the grammatical …