Discourse Sensitivity to ay-inversion by Canada-based Heritage Speakers of Tagalog

Abstract

Despite growing research on Tagalog grammar, bilingualism, and heritage language maintenance, relatively little work has examined how adult heritage Tagalog speakers evaluate and produce discourse-conditioned word order variation. The present study addresses this gap by examining how heritage and non-heritage Tagalog speakers judge and produce predicate-initial, actor and patient ay-inverted constructions in various discourse contexts. In ay-inversion, a constituent appears before the rest of the clause and is separated from it by the particle ay, functioning as an inversion marker.