The thetic/categorical distinction in Tagalog revisited: A contrastive perspective

It has been repeatedly proposed in one way or another that there are intriguing similarities between wa-marked topic NPs in Japanese and angmarked topic (or nominative) NPs in Tagalog and other Philippine languages (Shibatani 1988, 1991, Katagiri 2004, 2006). The key observation here is that Tagalog ang-marked topic NPs are not allowed in exclamative, meteorological, or existential constructions, where it is also not possible to use Japanese wamarked topic NPs. More recently, Santiago (2013) proposed that the distribution of topic NPs in Tagalog can be accounted for in terms of the thetic/ categorical distinction (Kuroda 1972). In this paper, I carry out a contrastive analysis of Tagalog topic NPs and Japanese topic NPs and challenge this hypothesis about the parallelism between Tagalog and Japanese. By reexamining the data already discussed in the literature and introducing additional sets of facts, it will be shown that: in Tagalog (i) non-topic-marking in allegedly thetic constructions can be explained by means of language-particular factors such as historical sources, (ii) topic NPs can appear in thetic sentences, and (iii) topicmarking is optional in some categorical sentences. Taken together, the above mentioned similarities between Tagalog and Japanese are shown to be superficial and coincidental. The contrast between thetic and categorical judgments realized in Japanese is not a good predictor of the occurrence or non-occurrence of topic NPs in Tagalog.