This dissertation examines Ilocano, an Austronesian Filipino language, within the Minimalist Framework, in an effort to tease apart the general syntactic properties of the language. I show that Ilocano underlying structure can easily be captured within the standard syntactic structures proposed for languages generally (Universal Grammar). In my examination of ellipsis in Ilocano, I concern myself strictly with syntactic and not semantic properties. I show that syntactic feature distribution (e.g. [+FOC], [+NEG], [+DET]) in combination with the two basic operations of the Minimalist Program: FEATURE-CHECKING and MERGE can account for both the underlying structure of Ilocano utterances as well as the word-order at Spell-Out, without making any stipulations not found in languages generally.My research also reveals new insights and corrects existing assumptions about certain previously undiscovered underlying structural properties of Ilocano. I account for the restrictive word ordering and structure found in Ilocano by assigning a universally applicable, non-controversial set of functional and lexical features to morphemes. These features satisfy, individually or collectively, feature-checking requirements in the language, resulting in the attested output of Ilocano. The types of ellipsis considered as a diagnostic toward that end are: NP-ellipsis, Bare Argument Ellipsis/Stripping, Gapping, Sluicing and Psuedogapping. I argue that the primary mechanism which licenses ellipsis in Ilocano is FOCUS-RAISING which allows extraction of remnant material prior to ellipsis of the TP in the case of all verbal-type ellipsis in Ilocano; or the DP in terms of Ilocano NP-ellipsis.

After nearly 400 years of colonial occupation by Spain, the Philippine Islands were signed over to the United States in the 1898 Treaty of Paris along with other Spanish colonies, Guam and Puerto Rico. The American acquisition of the Philippine archipelago marked the beginning of rapid linguistic, social and political transformations that have been at the center of life in the Philippines for the last century, characterized by massive swings in national language policy, the structuration of the modern educational system, political reorganizations and increased involvement in the global economy. The rapid expansion of "education-for-all" during the American Period (1898-1946) set the foundation for the role of education in daily life and created a nation of multilinguals - contemporarily, most people speak, at the very least, functional English and Filipino (official and national languages, respectively) in conjunction with their L1 (mother tongue), of which there are an estimated 170 living varieties throughout the island array. This study focuses on the minority language of Ilocano, a branch of the Malayo-Polynesian (Austronesian) language family and is the third largest minority language spoken in the Philippines with over 9 million speakers spread throughout the islands, having a strong literary tradition and a clearly defined ethnolinguistic homeland in the northernmost region of the island of Luzon. The articles contained in this dissertation variously investigate the linguistic, social, and ideological implications of the last century of contact and colonization among speakers of Ilocano and seek to understand why (and how), in light of colonization, missionization, Americanization, and globalization, minority languages like Ilocano have remained robust. Taken together, these analyses shed light on the dynamic interplay between linguistic, social, and ideological processes as they shape contemporary language practices found among Ilocano speakers negotiating the terms of their local and national participation in a continually shifting social, political, and linguistic landscape.