From Stephanie Shih, public discussion in comments below welcome

Shih, Stephanie and Kie Zuraw. 2015. Phonological conditions on variable adjective-noun word order in Tagalog. Ms, UC Merced and UCLA. (Submitted/Under review).

Abstract. Tagalog adjectives and nouns variably occur in two word orders, separated by an intermediary linker: adjective-linker-noun versus noun-linker-adjective. The linker has two phonologically-conditioned surface forms (–ng and na). This paper presents a large-scale, web-based corpus study of adjective/noun order variation in Tagalog, focusing in particular on phonological conditions. Results show that word order variation in adjective-noun pairs optimizes for phonological structure, abiding by phonotactic, syllabic, and morphophonological well-formedness preferences that are also found elsewhere in Tagalog grammar. The results indicate that surface phonological information is accessible for word order choice.