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 condi-tions. 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.