Phonological Determinants of Lexical Stress in Tagalog

This paper examines gradient syllable weight in Tagalog, an Austronesian language of the Philippines, as a test case of hypothesized universals governing stress (Kenstowicz 1997, Ryan 2011, 2014). Statistical analysis of a corpus of Tagalog stress shows that syllable structure and segmental properties affect stress preferences in gradient rather than purely categorical ways. There is an overall bias toward final stress, but final closed syllables display a stronger bias toward stress compared with final open syllables, i.e., words like liKOD ‘back’ are more common than those like liKO ‘turn’. Final stress is particularly likely when the penultimate syllable has no initial consonant, i.e. words like aLAM ‘know’ are more frequent than PALam ‘hollow’. Overall, the findings from Tagalog provide further quantitative evidence that stress systems often reflect probabilistic weight effects rather than strictly categorical rules.