1 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 b-um-ili should be literally glossed as ‘buyer’, while b-in-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 i