In a number of cases where two adverbial clitics cooccur in Tagalog, their combined semantic contribution may seem, at least at first glance, to differ from the transparent combination of its two component parts. In this paper, we describe and analyze the combinations pa lang which we can roughly describe as indicating “low progress” and na lang which indicates a “change of plan,” akin to English instead. These combinations include the clitics pa ‘still,’ na ‘already,’ and lang ‘only,’ whose individual semantics we must first clarify. We then argue that the distributions and contributions of both clitic combinations can be derived compositionally, although in the expression of ‘instead’ with na lang, we must also posit a covert necessity modal.

Keywords: semantics Tagalog clitic adverbs focus particles already still only