Lingg 166
FUNCTION of ANG and NG in TAGALOG and their COUNTERPARTS in CEBUANO
WHAT IS ANG?

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 : 2).

Other varying labels forang are: (6) topic case marker (Yap 1971); (7) relational marker that marks the topic or focus of the sentence (Ramos 1977); (8) definite phrase introducer (Wolfenden 1971 : 47-60).

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 : 47-60).

Tagalogng distinguishly marks different grammatical functions: agent/experiencer and patient/object/theme (de Guzman & Bender 2000 : 224). To differentiate them, they will be calledng-agent andng-patient respectively.Ng also functions as a possessive and adverbial marker.

Botha ng andng perform several grammatical functions and are used to indicate syntactic relations. They appear to be a combination of particles, markers, and determiners/articles, as will be seen in their usage in the sentences to follow. For now, we will use the terms PARTICLE and (relation) MARKER interchangeably in referring toang andng.

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 an OBLIQUE (Nolasco, 2005 : 4).

THETA/THEMATIC ROLES refers to the semantic relationship between verbs and their arguments (Haegeman 1991 : 41). 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 verbbi nigay \u2018to give\u2019 requires three arguments: the doer of the action, its object, and its goal. Ergo, Binigay ko ang bayad sa kanya [bini\u2019gaj ko \u0241a\u014b \u2018bajad sa kan\u2019ja] \u2018I gave the payment to him/her\u2019. The verb binigay assigns the role of AGENT/ACTOR to the subject argumentko, the role of OBJECT tobayad, and the role of GOAL tokanya.

Other common thematic roles are PATIENT, THEME, EXPERIENCER, BENEFACTIVE, SOURCE, LOCATION, etc. Some authors have combined the roles of PATIENT and THEME into one.

Features such as voice, focus and aspect will not be discussed 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.