Agents and Causes in Malagasy and Tagalog

Abstract This chapter uses overt morphological alternations in Malagasy and Tagalog – two Western Malayo-Polynesian languages – to probe issues concerning aspect (telicity) and argument structure. It argues that the telicity markers in these two languages can license the realization of an external argument which will be interpreted as CAUSE, and that this argument is merged into the structure in a syntactic position asymmetrically c-commanded by the merged position of the AGENT. Once this has been established, certain other conclusions can be drawn. For instance, theta-roles assigned in this manner are inherently different from theta-roles attached to the lexical entry of the root. Further, morpheme realization can be used to probe the argument structure of verbs that are less clear, and may vary from language to language, such as verbs of cognition.