I quit
I have nothing else intelligent to say. I am now making it sound like I — oh wonderful me! — solved the mysteries of Tagalog voicing and determiners. This is of course because I simplified things, and made -um- (well, mag-; for reasons which are unclear to me, this verb prefers mag-) and -in only worry about thematic role. This is of course not true. Andrea Rackowski has a very nice thesis which shows that it more accurately agrees with case. I mention it, then promptly ignore it, because it’s convenient, and because this is only a course paper.
I do think I have *something* in what I’m saying. I do think that the voicing introduces arguments. I think it makes a lot of sense, and that it might also work for other languages with this sort of voicing system. I would love to see it work on Malagasy . . . there’ve been syntactic analyses (as with Tagalog) but I’m curious to see how it works if you look at it through the semantics.
I even take into account whether things are prefixes or suffixes (the famous problem you saw in your first OT assignment, with Tagalog -um- infixation? I’m calling it a prefix, cause it almost is). That’s sort of nice; I was initially not bothering to take that into consideration, and trying to call them *all* prefixes, or suffixes, whichever: it didn’t work well.
But the problem with introductions and conclusions is — well, what do I say? I don’t have a good enough grasp of the field to be able to place this in context. I might want to tell you, at the beginning, where I’m going to go in general, but that’s alone does not make an introduction. And I’ve a few ideas about what this predicts, but not enough for a conclusion. And my mad bullshit skillz will not help me out here.
Oh well. I’ll write *something*, be joyous, and then amuse myself by reading ultra-directional-wing commentary on Saddam Hussein’s capture. (Yes, it was a good thing. No, I still don’t think the war was justified.)