In Conversation with Ella Moran, Yale College '27
Syntax, Heritage, and Summer Fieldwork in the Philippines
Through the Harold C. Conklin Research Fellowship in the Philippines, I spent eight weeks in Metro Manila this summer and conducted a research project investigating verb-initial word order in two Philippine languages, Tagalog and Karay-a. As verb-initial word order is a typologically rare linguistic phenomenon, I wanted to bring evidence from Philippine languages into the conversation surrounding syntactic theories of word order, and in doing so, help increase the representation and recognition of Philippine languages within and beyond the field of linguistics. As a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Linguistics at University of the Philippines Diliman, I met with three native speakers—two speakers of Tagalog and one speaker of both Tagalog and Karay-a— to collect grammaticality judgments.
As a heritage learner of Tagalog, how has your personal connection to the Philippines influenced your academic interests and this research project ?
Learning Tagalog has always been something that’s been really important to me—I grew up hearing my mom speaking Tagalog with her family but never learned more than a few words and phrases. It’s been incredible to have had the opportunity to learn Tagalog throughout my time at Yale, first through the DILS program and now through CSEAS’s newly established Filipino language program. In my personal quest to understand and connect to my Filipino heritage through language, I became really excited about pursuing linguistics research on Philippine languages. Given that major-Indo European languages (like English) have largely dominated formal linguistics research, bringing data from Philippine languages into the conversation is a way of not just understanding my heritage but also preserving and celebrating the incredible linguistic diversity of the Philippines.
For readers who may be unfamiliar with linguistics, what drew you to investigate verb-initial word order specifically, rather than another aspect of language?
My research interests lie primarily in syntax, the study of language structure, and semantics, the study of language meaning. Word order plays a fundamental role in syntax and is an interesting point of language variation. A majority of the world’s languages have word orders that are either SOV (subject-object-verb) or SVO (subject-verb-object), like English. Most Philippine languages, on the other hand, are verb-initial languages (either VSO or VOS word order). Given that verb-initial languages make up only about 10% of the world’s languages, I was really excited to investigate a syntactic phenomenon that is so characteristic of Philippine languages.
How did working directly with native speakers in Manila inform your thinking about the linguistic questions at the center of your project?
Working with native speakers of Tagalog and Karay-a was an amazing experience! In trying to determine how verb-initial word order works in these languages and what kinds of syntactic structures are possible, I had to ask a lot of questions related to how sentences are interpreted relative to word order. This is intuitive information that only native speakers can provide. It was also really fun to learn with them as well—one of the fun parts about being a linguist and doing this type of fieldwork is that language consultants will often recognize patterns in their language(s) that they didn’t notice before, simply because they’re native speakers. It was always cool to be part of that “Oh wait! I didn’t realize we say it that way…” moment and to talk about all sorts of interesting linguistic phenomena that just come up in casual conversation.
Looking beyond this summer, how do you see the Harold C. Conklin Research Fellowship and your experiences in Yale’s Filipino language program influencing your future academic and research goals?
I’m really excited by the possibility of continuing my work in Tagalog and Karay-a syntax in my senior thesis this coming year! Being able to learn about and start contributing to the field of Philippine linguistics this summer was a really meaningful experience, and regardless of what I end up doing for my thesis, I plan to continue doing research on Philippine languages in the future. I’m also excited to continue developing my Filipino language skills under the mentorship of Dr. Louward Allen Zubiri, Lector in Philippine Language Studies at CSEAS, and look forward to taking Advanced Filipino I this fall!