An Experimental Study of Counterdirectional Readings of Muli ‘Again’ in Tagalog

This study explores whether the Tagalog adverb muli ‘again’ allows counterdirectional readings, where the direction of an event is reversed compared to a previous one. Two types of counterdirectional readings were examined: (i) the identical counterdirectional reading, where the same verbal meaning appears in both events (e.g., call-call), and (ii) the similar counterdirectional reading, where semantically different but related verbal meanings appear in both events (e.g., call-text). An experiment with native Tagalog speakers suggested that muli tends to allow both types of readings. These results suggest that muli, like Korean tasi again’ (Lee 2025), is semantically flexible and can refer to past events that are either the same or similar in type. The findings support a lexical analysis, which allows reference to related prior events, and raise challenges for structural accounts that rely on syntactic identity. Typologically, the study indicates that Tagalog patterns with Korean, unlike English, which does not permit counterdirectional readings. This study thus contributes to a broader understanding of how languages vary in expressing repeated or reversed events.