The impersonal construction in Tagalog

This paper argues that the impersonal construction in Tagalog, in which a formally invariant predicate may/mayroon ‘exist/have’ is followed by a thematic predicate, is structurally related to the existential construction and the possessive construction both employing the same predicate may/mayroon. A variety of different facts including interpretation, NP distribution, patterns of argument-marking, word-order, pluralization, multiple occurrence of adverbials, long-distance construal of adverbs, locality and extraction are shown to follow from the analysis.

• Affiliations: 1: City University of Hong Kong