Observations on Tagalog Genitive Inversion

Abstract:Tagalog is a strongly head-initial language: arguments without special discourse status typically follow their lexical heads. However, genitive-marked pronominal arguments display a word order alternation where instead of following their lexical head, they may precede it. This alternation, which I refer to here as Genitive Inversion, has received comparatively little attention in the research on Tagalog, even though it is relatively commonplace. This paper offers a detailed description of the behavior of Genitive Inversion, showing what kinds of arguments it can apply to and what environments it can apply in. I show that this process raises questions about the basic properties of Tagalog and discuss directions for potential analyses and avenues for further research into this topic.