Tagaloga ng has been analyzed as: (1) an article, equivalent to Englishthe (2) a particle, because of its having an uninflectable form; (3) a noun or nominal marker, because it is used to introduce a nominal phrase; (4) a determiner, being immediately followed by a nominal head phrase; (5) a thematizer and syntactic thema marker, in that it serves more than the role of a specifier and acts as an equational syntactic grammaticalizer (Llido 2006).

Other varying labels forang are: (6) topic case marker (Yap 1971); (7) relational marker that marks the topic or focus of the sentence (Ramos 1971); (8) definite phrase introducer (Wolfenden 1971).

Tagalogng has been assumed to be: (1) relational marker, a non-focus marking particle of actor or goal complements of noun phrases (Ramos 1977); (2) attributive phrase introducer (Wolfenden 1971).

Tagalogng distinguishly mark different grammatical functions: agent/experiencer and patient/object/theme (de Guzman & Bender 2000). To differentiate them, they will be calledng- agent andng-patient respectively.Ng also functions as a possessive and adverbial marker.

A PARTICLE is defined as (1) a function word \u2013 unstressed word in the sentence, expressing primarily grammatical relationship (Pei 1966); (2) a word, usually uninflected and invariable, used to indicate syntactic relationships (Pei & Gaynor 1954); (3) a word which cannot occur with affixes, nor as subject or predicate, most of the particles are either modifiers or markers of syntactic relations (Constantino 1965).

A RELATION MARKER is a noun marking particle that indicates the grammatical function (actor, goal, location, beneficiary, and instrument) of the noun or noun phrase that they introduce (Ramos 1977).

A DETERMINER is (1) a generic expression for articles, possessives, demonstratives, etc. (Pei 1966); (2) A word class, which serves to specify the degree of applicability of a noun phrase (Trask 1997).

An ARTICLE is (1) a noun marker \u2013 common article and demonstratives occur with common nouns, and the proper article occurs with proper nouns (Constatntino 1965); (2) a special type of determiner found in some languages which typically expresses the degree of specificity or definiteness assigned to the noun phrase containing it (Trask 1997).

CASE pertains to how the arguments of a predicate are formally encoded to distinguish between S (subject), A (agent), P (patient) and obliques. S, A, and P may be referred to as the core cases, while any other argument which is not an A, an S or a P is anoblique (Nolasco, 2005).

THETA/THEMATIC ROLES refers to the semantic relationship between verbs and their arguments (Haegeman 1991). Arguments are said to be elements or constituents which are obligatory in a sentence. The verb determines the number of arguments needed. As an example, the Tagalog verbbinigay \u2018to give\u2019 requires three arguments: the doer of the action, its object, and its goal. Ergo, Binigay ko ang bayad sa kanya \u2018I gave the payment to him/her\u2019. The verb binigay assigns the role AGENT/ACTOR to the subject argumentko, the role OBJECT to

Haegeman 1991 mentions the following thematic roles: (1) AGENT/ACTOR \u2013 the one who intentionally initiates the action expressed by the predicate. (2) PATIENT \u2013 the person or thing undergoing the action expressed by the predicate. (3) THEME \u2013 the person or thing moved by the action expressed by the predicate. (4) EXPERIENCER \u2013 the entity that experiences

BENEFACTIVE/BENEFICIARY \u2013 the entity that benefits from the action expressed by the predicate. (6) GOAL \u2013 the entity towards which the activity expressed by the predicate is directed. (7) SOURCE \u2013 the entity from which something is moved as a result of the activity expressed by the predicate. (8) LOCATION \u2013 the place in which the action or state expressed by the predicate is situated.

Features such as voice, focus and aspect will be discussed minimally here as they are attributed mainly to verbs, in which they (voice, focus, and aspect) are morphologically realized as affixes. The verbal morphology of Tagalog and its properties are not the central topic of the paper.