On the Overlooked Diversity of Clause Structures and Argument Structures in Non-Indo-European Languages

Abstract

This article responds to a conference call for papers that makes universalist assumptions about clause structures, assuming all languages in the world basically follow the same organizing principles in terms of clause structure, argument structure, and alignment. The article presents data from Tagalog to show how different a language can be from the assumed universal organizing principles to make the point that by imposing an Indo-European framework on non-Indo-European languages, we are overlooking the true diversity of language forms found in the world’s languages.

Keywords

• argument structure
• clause structure
• grammatical alignment
• head-marking
• Tagalog
• Philippine-type languages