Searching for Structure
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Searching for Structure
Studies in Discourse and Grammar Studies in Discourse and Grammar is a monograph series providing a forum for research on grammar as it emerges from and is accounted for by discourse contexts. The assumption underlying the series is that corpora reflecting language as it is actually used are necessary, not only for the verification of grammatical analyses, but also for understanding how the regularities we think of as grammar emerge from communicative needs. Research in discourse and grammar draws upon both spoken and written corpora, and it is typically, though not necessarily, quantitative. Monographs in the series propose explanations for grammatical regularities in terms of recurrent discourse patterns, which reflect communicative needs, both informational and socio-cultural.
Editors Sandra A. Thompson University of California at Santa Barbara Department of Linguistics Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA
Paul J. Hopper Carnegie Mellon University Department of English Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA
Volume 13 Searching for Structure: The problem of complementation in colloquial Indonesian conversation by Robert Englebretson
Searching for Structure The problem of complementation in colloquial Indonesian conversation
Robert Englebretson Rice University
John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia
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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Englebretson, Robert Searching for structure : the problem of complementation in colloquial Indonesian conversation / Robert Englebretson. p. cm. (Studies in Discourse and Grammar, issn 0928–8929 ; v. 13) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Indonesian language--Discourse analysis. 2. Indonesian language-Complement. 3. Indonesian language--Semantics. 4. Indonesian language-Verb. I. Title. II. Series. PL5071.E64 2003 499’2210141-dc21 2002043615 isbn 9027226237 (Eur.) / 1588113671 (US) (Hb; alk. paper)
© 2003 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Acknowledgments Chapter 1 Preliminaries 1.1 Orientation and overview1 1.2 Language background4 1.2.1 The colloquial Indonesian corpus5 1.2.2 Sociolinguistic factors9 1.2.3 Basic grammar sketch13 1.3 Complementation in functional linguistics21 1.4 Complementation in Indonesian linguistics28 1.4.1 Sneddon29 1.4.2 Sugono and Indiyastini31 1.5 Contents of the book34 Chapter 2 Juxtaposed clauses 2.1 Introduction37 2.2 Examples of juxtaposed clauses38 2.2.1 Framed instantiations39 2.2.2 Non-framing juxtaposed clauses46 2.3 Prosody51 2.3.1 Increments54 2.3.2 Single-IU versus distributed prosody54 2.4 Semantics60 2.4.1 The framing clause60 2.4.2 The framed material61 2.5 Morphosyntax65 2.5.1 Constituent order66 2.5.2 Verb morphology69 2.6 Summary90
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Chapter 3 Complementizers in context: An analysis of bahwa 3.1 Introduction93 3.2 Distributional factors95 3.3 Bahwa after verbal predicates100 3.3.1 Noncontiguity102 3.3.2 Verbs preceding bahwa107 3.3.3 Verb morphology112 3.4 Bahwa after an NP117 3.5 Unframed bahwa clauses120 3.6 Bahwa as local discourse marker123 3.7 Summary126 Chapter 4 Verbs in series 4.1 Introduction127 4.2 Overview of verb serialization128 4.2.1 Verb contiguity129 4.2.2 Single intonation unit130 4.2.3 Argument sharing130 4.2.4 The role of trigger arguments133 4.3 Types of serial verb constructions135 4.3.1 Serial verbs as putative complements135 4.3.2 Serial verbs with other semantic relationships136 4.3.3 Serial verbs with overt connectors139 4.3.4 Serial verbs as auxiliaries143 4.4 Implications and discussion147 4.4.1 The structural status of serialization147 4.4.2 Evidence from prosody and grammar149 4.5 Summary150 Chapter 5 Epistemic -nya constructions 5.1 Introduction153 5.2 General overview of -nya157 5.2.1 -nya as possessive marker157 5.2.2 -nya as identifiability marker161 5.2.3 -nya as nominalizer168
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5.2.4 -nya as pronominal marker169 5.2.5 -nya as adverbial marker170 5.2.6 Summary171 5.3 -nya as framing device172 5.3.1 Evidentials172 5.3.2 Mental/emotional attitude178 5.3.3 Assessments of interactional relevance181 5.4 Discussion and implications185 Chapter 6 Conclusion
187
References
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Appendices
199
Name index
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Subject index
203
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Acknowledgments
I dedicate this book to the faculty and graduate students of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California Santa Barbara. I would like to express my gratitude for the years of friendship, encouragement, and discussions, and I feel privileged to have been part of such an exceptional intellectual and interpersonal community. Sandy Thompson got me hooked on linguistics way back in Fall 1989, when I was a student in her undergraduate functional syntax course. Since then, she has continued to be both a mentor and friend, and is a linguist extraordinaire to whom I owe a huge intellectual debt. Her comments and encouragement at every stage of this manuscript have provided clarity, perspective, and insight. And, if it weren’t for Susanna Cumming, I would never have gotten into Indonesian in the first place! I especially appreciate her insights into discourse and grammar, and the time, constructive criticism, and expertise she has invested in seeing me bring this project to fruition. Carol Genetti, Bill Ashby, Ken Hugoniot, Ed Luna, and Mike Ewing have also contributed to the emergence of this book, and I thank each of them. I would especially like to thank the Indonesian speakers whose everyday talk and interaction forms the database for this study. Without their words, and permission to record them, this study would not have been possible. In particular, I would like to thank the three research assistants who worked with me on the data in Yogyakarta: Elisabeth Arti Wulandari, Lucy Setyowati, and Utty Damayanti-Rumpak all had a hand in transcribing the DAT recordings, glossing and translating the transcripts into a relational database, answering grammatical questions, and helping this bule understand many of the subtle nuances of Indonesian culture. Of course, any misunderstandings of Indonesian language or culture in this book remain solely my responsibility. Special thanks are also due to Greg McCourt and the staff of Pusat Studi Indonesia at Universitas Gadjah Mada, who provided office space and contacts with assistants. I gratefully acknowledge the UCSB Graduate Division, the UCSB Linguistics Department, and Rice University — all of whom have provided financial
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support at various stages of this project. I would especially like to recognize the role of the 1999–2000 U. C. President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship in providing me the opportunity to focus solely on writing the dissertation on which this book is based.
Chapter 1
Preliminaries
1.1 Orientation and overview This book is essentially a study in the dynamics of linguistic categorization from a discourse-functional perspective. It addresses a problematic grammatical category in a specific language — namely complementation in colloquial Indonesian — and, based on an analysis of a corpus of naturally-occurring conversation, presents evidence that this linguistic category in fact does not exist in this language variety. In arriving at this conclusion, the book illustrates the benefits gained from analyzing grammar as it occurs in natural discourse, and suggests that a thorough understanding of this one area of Indonesian grammar provides crucial insights into the nature of linguistic structure and grammatical categories in general. The previous two decades have seen an upsurge of interest in the relationship between grammar and discourse. Specifically, researchers have begun to seek functional explanations for linguistic form, based on observing naturallyoccurring language-in-use. In this view, linguistic structure, or grammar, is understood as emerging from and being motivated by real instances of language use. Such research suggests that grammar is shaped by the interactional and communicative purposes which it fulfills, in actual contexts, by real speakers (cf. Hopper 1987, 1988, 1998; Givón 1979, 1984, 1990, 2001a, 2001b). One strand of discourse-functional research focuses on the conceptual systems of language users in discourse, demonstrating how aspects of grammar arise out of human cognitive capacities and constraints (cf. Chafe 1980, 1987, 1994). Another strand of discourse-functional research, recently dubbed interactional linguistics (cf. Selting and Couper-Kuhlen 2001), investigates how grammar arises out of both the interactional environment of language use, and the communicative goals of the speakers which it serves (cf. Ono and Thompson 1995, Cumming and Ono 1997, Ford, Fox, and Thompson 2002b, and works cited therein). One of the many avenues of research within this broader paradigm has been
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the investigation of traditional linguistic categories within everyday discourse, and the pursuit of data-driven, realistic accounts of their distribution and use. These categories include, among others, adjectives (Thompson 1988; Englebretson 1997a, 1997b), adverbial clauses (Ford 1993), deixis and determiners (Laury 1996, 1997; Fincke 1995), ergativity (Du Bois 1985, 1987), parts-ofspeech (Hopper and Thompson 1984), prepositions and particles (O’Dowd 1998), relative clauses (Fox and Thompson 1990), transitivity (Hopper and Thompson 1980, Thompson and Hopper 2001), and issues of clause and argument structure (Helasvuo 2001; Ewing 1999). Such research has demonstrated the necessity of studying the grammar of everyday spoken language, as categories tend to behave quite differently from what is often assumed by linguists whose methodology consists primarily of decontextualized elicited sentences or of intuition-based grammaticality judgments of idealized, invented examples. The present book seeks to further contribute to the investigation of grammatical categories in natural discourse, presenting a systematic study of the issues surrounding complementation in colloquial Indonesian conversation. As defined by Noonan (1985: 42), whose comprehensive cross-linguistic summary of complementation still serves as the definitive work on this topic, complementation refers to: “the syntactic situation that arises when a notional sentence or predication is an argument of a predicate”. This definition characterizes complements as grammatically-defined structures: a complement is a predicate which is itself a syntactic argument of another predicate. Noonan goes on to claim that complementation is universal; all languages have complements, and in fact all languages have at least two types: “All languages have an S-like indicative complement type, and all languages have some sort of reduced complement type in opposition to the indicative” (Noonan 1985: 133). However, other researchers (most notably Dixon 1995) provide counterexamples — languages which cannot be claimed to have complementation as a grammatical category. Dixon claims such languages employ ‘complementation strategies’ for expressing the semantic concepts for which other languages use grammatical complementation. One of the aims of the present study is to address this question for Indonesian: does Indonesian in fact make use of a morphosyntactically-defined category of complementation? What does evidence from discourse data reveal about the existence of grammatical complements in this language? Rather than assuming the existence of complementation per se and seeking examples to justify it, I will approach this question by determining whether patterns in the data actually provide any evidence in the first place to support the existence of complementation as a robust category in Indonesian grammar.
Preliminaries
While there is no doubt that Indonesian does in fact have semantic resources for expressing the concepts which are generally expressed by complements cross-linguistically, the central question concerns the degree to which these semantic resources have been grammaticized. As an analogy, consider the case of another morphological category, namely verb tense. While tense is indeed a valid category for many languages, it is by no means universal. Bybee (1985: 31) demonstrates that only 25 of the 50 languages in her research sample actually express tense. It is not a feature of the grammatical systems of the remaining 50% of the languages in her sample. Such languages do have other resources for expressing temporal relations (e.g. adverbs, aspectual particles, and contextual inference), but tense is not a robust grammatical category for many languages. This is in fact the case for Indonesian. While Indonesian speakers can express temporal distinctions by means of adverbs (e.g. dulu ‘previously’, kemarin ‘yesterday’, sekarang ‘now’, etc.) or aspectual particles (e.g. sudah ‘already’ for perfective aspect, lagi ‘again’ for progressive aspect, etc.), these are not obligatory, and there is no actual morphosyntactic means of expressing tense. In other words, while Indonesian speakers do have semantic resources for situating events in time, tense has not been grammaticized into the morphosyntax of this language. The variety and diversity of morphological systems such as tense, aspect, and mood, or nominal systems such as marking of case, gender, an number, is widely recognized; yet linguists have been hesitant to recognize the diversity across languages with respect to larger, clause-level grammatical resources. It is hoped that the present study will contribute to an understanding of linguistic diversity for grammar above the clause. The remainder of this chapter serves as background for the book by introducing essential concepts, terminology, and discussion. 1.2 gives a brief introduction to Indonesian, specifically within the context of this study: 1.2.1 describes the corpus data which this study is based on, 1.2.2 outlines the sociolinguistic background of colloquial Indonesian, and 1.2.3 presents a brief sketch of key points of Indonesian grammar, to facilitate the understanding of examples by non-Indonesianist readers. The subsequent two sections provide definitions of complementation and contextualize this study with respect to previous approaches: 1.3 addresses relevant work on complementation in functional linguistics in general, and 1.4 deals with the terminological confusion surrounding the Indonesian linguistic terms komplemen ‘complement’ and komplementasi ‘complementation’. The final section of this chapter provides a general outline of the book itself.
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1.2 Language background Indonesian is a variety of Malay — a Western Austronesian language of insular South-East Asia. Other varieties of Malay are widely spoken in Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. The formal variety spoken in Indonesia was given the name Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) by the Youth Congress of 1928, and was adopted as the sole official language of the Indonesian Republic in the Constitution of 1945. It is estimated (cf. statistics summarized in Abas 1987) that by the year 2041, fully 100 percent of Indonesia’s population will be speakers of this language. Most Indonesians will continue to speak a local language as well (e.g. Javanese, Sundanese, Madurese, Batak, Balinese, etc.); but due to its function as a unifying language in a multi-ethnic society, as well as the language planning policies of Pusat Pembinaan Dan Pengembangan Bahasa (Center for Language Development), Indonesian plays a crucial role in the daily communications of most people. This is especially true among university-educated urban residents whose language comprises the database for the present study. As the official language of the world’s fourth-most populous country, Indonesian clearly occupies a place among the major languages of the world. Yet, comparatively speaking, studies of Indonesian have been relatively rare, and have given little attention to the variety of Indonesian used in everyday conversation. Furthermore, most existing studies focus on grammar at the level of the clause or below. This book seeks to further the linguistic understanding of Indonesian grammar by studying colloquial Indonesian conversational data, and by focusing on constructions larger than a single clause. Specifically, this book will investigate complementation in a corpus of spontaneously-occurring Indonesian conversation. The choice of Indonesian for this study is well motivated. It is an especially good candidate for investigating the possibility of diversity of complementation, since it does not make use of any of the resources described in the literature to indicate that a clause is functioning as an argument of another clause; grammatical subordination, finite/nonfinite verbs, and nominal case are irrelevant categories for describing Indonesian grammar. For this reason, I am interested in analyzing how Indonesian expresses the semantic resources which tend to be encoded cross-linguistically by complementation. The use of colloquial conversational language as the data for this study is also not arbitrary. This language variety is both primary and pervasive, in the sense that it is the earliest genre of language acquired by children, the kind of language which speakers use most of the time, and is the locus for everyday
Preliminaries
social interaction. The unplanned, “on-line”, spontaneous nature of conversation provides a unique window on cognition and language production (cf. Chafe 1980, 1994, inter alia), and, as demonstrated by researchers in Conversation Analysis, provides a venue for observing social interaction at work (cf. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974 for the seminal proposal in this area). In the context of Indonesian societal attitudes about language, informal conversation is an arena marked by a relaxing of the externally-imposed, prescriptive norms of “standard” Indonesian, which has at least two significant consequences for research. First, it provides a window for observing grammaticization in progress — especially when presently-grammaticizing forms are proscribed against and are generally absent from more formal, planned genres of Indonesian. Secondly, because it is viewed as “nonstandard”, both by speakers of this variety, and by Indonesian linguists, colloquial Indonesian has tended to be undervalued as a legitimate grammatical system (cf. the discussion in 1.2.2 below), and is not well-described in Indonesianist literature (see Ewing, to appear, for a welcome exception). But in fact, other research suggests that conversational language in general is indeed a valid and worthwhile object for understanding and researching grammar (cf. Ono and Thompson 1995, Ford, Fox, and Thompson 2002b, and works cited therein). Following Schegloff: “Transparently, the natural environment of language use is talk-in-interaction, and originally ordinary conversation. The natural home environment of clauses and sentences is turnsat-talk. Must we not understand the structures of grammar to be in important respects adaptations to the turn-at-talk in a conversational turn-taking system with its interactional contingencies?” (Schegloff 1993: 143). Since grammar is shaped by both cognitive and social factors, there is no better place for empirical observation and study of grammar than conversation. 1.2.1 The colloquial Indonesian corpus The data for this study consists of a corpus of six transcribed audio recordings of naturally-occurring spontaneous discourse. These segments are part of larger speech events which make up the approximately 25 hours of spoken Indonesian I collected while doing fieldwork in Yogyakarta (Central Java) in 1996. All recordings were made on Digital Audio Tape (DAT) by Indonesian assistants whom I had lent equipment and trained in field recording techniques. The speech events were not elicited, and I (the foreign researcher) was not present during the recording sessions. Portions of these recordings were then transcribed by native-speaking research assistants working under my supervision.
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For the transcribed portions, I chose continuous segments with as little background noise as possible to facilitate accurate transcription, and I attempted to choose segments which start several minutes into the speech event, after participants have stopped orienting to the novelty of being recorded. The methodology for data collection, as well as for choosing the segments to transcribe, is essentially the same as the methodology employed by the Santa Barbara corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE) (cf. Chafe et al. 1991). The six segments range in length from roughly 24 to 55 minutes, and comprise speakers of both genders and from a variety of regional origins. For a description of each of the speech events, see the table and text beginning on the following page. The transcription system is a slightly-modified version of that outlined in Du Bois et al. (1992, 1993), a condensed overview of which is presented in Appendix B. In this transcription system, the basic unit of spoken language is referred to as the IU (Intonation Unit), which is broadly defined as: “a stretch of speech uttered under a single coherent intonation contour. It tends to be marked by cues such as a pause and a shift upward in overall pitch level at its beginning, and a lengthening of its final syllable” (Du Bois et al. 1993: 47). Each IU of a speech event appears as a single line in the transcription. For further definition, discussion, and justification of the Intonation Unit see Chafe (1980, 1994, inter alia), Du Bois et al. (1992, 1993), and Schuetze-Coburn, Shapley, and Weber (1991). After checking the transcripts myself, I worked with a second research assistant to reconcile any inconsistencies, and to seek clarification on sociocultural aspects of the interaction and portions of the conversation which I found difficult to follow. I then glossed and translated these segments into a database, which involved considerable native-speaker consulting with two of the three research assistants, who also provided the few elicited sentences which appear in Sections 2.5.1–2.5.2. All three research assistants were women in their early twenties who had just graduated, or were about to graduate, from Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta. All three have degrees in English (either literature or Linguistics), and were native speakers of both Indonesian and Javanese. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to these three individuals, without whose assistance and native-speaker expertise this study would not have been possible. For an overview of the glossing conventions of examples presented in this book, consult Appendix A. Unless it is relevant for the discussion at hand, I do not always provide full morphemic glosses for morphologically complex forms in the data. For instance, in example (2) in Section 2.2.1, I simply gloss the word perusahaan as ‘company’, and I do not indicate here its derivation as the root
Preliminaries
usaha ‘labor’ with the nominal circumfix per- -an, since it is not germane to the discussion at hand and would be unnecessarily distracting. After transcription and glossing, I then exhaustively coded the data in Paradox (a relational database), loosely following the Paradise system for management and coding of discourse data developed by Susanna Cumming at the University of California Santa Barbara. All text counts presented in this book come from this database. Table 1 lists statistical information about each of the six segments in the database: numbers of IUs, words, and segment duration. It is followed by a brief description of each segment. The first four speech events are informal, interactional conversations, while the remaining two are relatively formal, discussionoriented material. The first four segments listed in Table 1 are casual conversations among friends, comprising 24,074 words of spontaneous discourse. All speakers are between the ages of 18 and 26, and most are currently students at various universities in Yogyakarta. For each speaker in these segments, I collected basic ethnographic data after the recording session, e.g. age, level of education, city of origin, and self-reports of what languages they speak and in which contexts. All speakers have used Indonesian since early childhood, were educated in Indonesian, use it regularly in daily interactions (especially in formal settings and with people from other parts of Indonesia) and consider it to be a native language. All speakers are bilingual in at least one other language, most frequently Table 1.Overview of corpus Genre
Title
IUs
Words
Time
Pencuri Blewah Dingdong Wisuda
3,902 1,331 1,685 1,826
10,974 3,823 4,053 5,224
:55:10 :24:23 :30:14 :41:40
8,744
24,074
2:31:07
1,781 2,447
5,390 6,801
:43:20 :43:17
Subtotal
4,228
12,191
1:26:37
Total
12,972
36,265
3:57:44
Informal conversation
Subtotal Formal discussion Muram Tanya-Jawab
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Javanese. Indonesian-Javanese codeswitching does occur, even when not all speakers present are Javanese. “Pencuri” (Thief) is a discussion among 8 women who live in the same student boardinghouse. Not all speakers are present for the entire segment, as the discussion is taking place in the midst of everyday life — eating lunch, washing clothes, taking phone calls, etc. The conversation for much of the segment centers around experiences with pickpockets and thieves, although the students also discuss upcoming exams, birthdays, and other topics. “Blewah” (a type of melon) consists of 4 women eating lunch together, discussing a wide range of topics, including cooking, gossip about friends, and one of the women’s concerns about her upcoming required community service (KKN) in a nearby village. This particular segment contains frequent Indonesian-Javanese codeswitching, despite the fact that one of the women present is not Javanese. “Dingdong” (the onomatopoeic nickname of a pinball-like video game) consists of a conversation among three men who live in the same student boardinghouse. The three are sitting outside smoking, and move inside to watch television when it starts raining near the end of the segment. The discussion centers around their favorite video games, and includes much smalltalk about women. The three are briefly joined by a fourth male housemate, who is leaving to eat dinner. “Wisuda” (graduation) is an interaction between two men watching television. Both men are working on masters degrees in business, and will be graduating within the upcoming month. Topics include recent job interviews and a trip to Jakarta, military service, and subject matter prompted by the television. The remaining two transcripts, 12,191 words, are spontaneous spoken discourse data from other genres. While they exhibit many features of colloquial Indonesian (see 1.2.2 below), interactional factors differentiate them from typical face-to-face conversation. Interactionally, both are discussions which are led or moderated by one of the participants. These are very different from the give-and-take and floor negotiations found in conversational data. Furthermore, these segments differ from the conversational data in that they exhibit many more features of standard Indonesian than are found in the face-to-face conversations. Interestingly, although both of these segments are fairly formal, they still contain some Javanese-Indonesian codeswitching, and a range of grammatical and lexical forms generally considered nonstandard. “Muram” (Gloom) is a recording of a student discussion group. There are 23 speakers present, although only 8 actually speak during the segment. This
Preliminaries
particular group of students meets monthly, on the lawn outside the university auditorium, to discuss issues such as music, art, and literature. Much ambient background noise can be heard throughout this segment, including a gamelan performance from inside the auditorium. The main topic of this discussion deals with emotion in music and art, and the responsibility of the artist in the creative process. While glossing and translating this particular segment, the research assistants strongly expressed the opinion that these speakers’ use of language is extremely pretentious and stuffy. The sixth segment, “Tanya Jawab” (Q and A) is a recording of a radio callin show. This is the only segment for which I do not have ethnographic data about the speakers. This particular radio show takes place on a weekly basis, consisting of two men — an a Muslim cleric and a moderator — who answer audience phone-in questions about Islam and the Koran. The language variety is fairly formal, but does contain features of colloquial Indonesian as well as Javanese-Indonesian codeswitching. All discourse examples presented in this book come from these six speech events. For each example, I have provided the name of the transcript and the line-number(s) for each Intonation Unit. The few examples not from this corpus were elicited from the research assistants, and have been labeled “Elicited”. Examples taken from published sources are designated as such. 1.2.2 Sociolinguistic factors As is generally true of real-life interactional data, the language variety exemplified in the corpus does not have discrete, well-defined boundaries. All language users command a continuum of language varieties, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the multi-lingual, multi-register society of present-day Indonesia. All of the speakers in the corpus claim fluency in at least one local language besides Indonesian, most speak a foreign language such as English or French, and many use Arabic in the context of Islam. Within Indonesian, as well as local languages, there is a wide range of register variation appropriate for different situations and addressees. (For a comprehensive description of this situation in Javanese, see Errington 1988.) All speakers in the corpus (with the possible exception of the speakers in “Tanya Jawab” for whom I have no ethnographic data) claim Indonesian as a native language. They have been educated in Indonesian, have spoken it from a very young age, are exposed to it by the media, and use it in their lives as university students. Additionally, these speakers claim that they are speaking Indonesian in the speech events I
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have recorded. Yet the language variety is not the standard written Indonesian (bahasa baku) of education and literature. While the data does contain features of standard Indonesian: formal lexical items, verbal affixes meN-, -kan, -i, and personal pronouns such as saya ‘1sg’, it also contains features which would not be considered appropriate for the written language: affixless verbs, verbal affixes N-, ke-, and -in, and personal pronouns such as tak ‘1sg’ and lu ‘2sg’. In addition to lexical and grammatical variation, there are also some phonological aspects which tend to characterize the data as colloquial. The transcription of the data employs standard orthography for the most part, but occasionally forms are transcribed to reflect colloquial pronunciation, such as (colloquial) temen ‘friend’ for (standard) teman. Decisions regarding nonstandard orthography were left to the discretion of the native-speaker research assistants doing the transcription. Many of these lexical, grammatical, and phonological features are presumably borrowed from other languages or varieties, e.g. Jakarta Malay, also called Betawi (cf. Grijns 1991, Ikranegara 1980), and Javanese (cf. Poedjosoedarmo 1982). The features found in my data seem identical to those described by Wouk (1989), in the language variety she calls SJI (Spoken Jakartan Indonesian). Wouk (1999) suggests that Spoken Jakartan Indonesian is a koiné, with features of both the Betawi dialect as well as the dialect which is recognized as standard written Indonesian. The Jakartan influence on the spoken Indonesian in my database was also noted by the research assistants, in response to my queries about the origins of some of the forms not found in standard Indonesian. Yet, most of the speakers in the corpus have never lived in Jakarta, suggesting that this koiné is not limited to the Jakarta area. While a few are in fact originally from Jakarta, most of the speakers in the database are from areas as diverse as Irian Jaya, Sumatra, Sulawesi, and various parts of Java. I am not the first researcher to suggest that Spoken Jakartan Indonesian has become a colloquial variety used outside Jakarta. Poedjosoedarmo (1982) has made similar observations: At first, Djakarta Indonesian was popular only among the students, but later it spread to the Djakartanese in general including the educated and the political elite. Many people used it indiscriminately both in talking to friends or to low class workers and in addressing respected strangers. However, in the last decade Djakarta Indonesian has become a separate colloquial style of Indonesian. Although its use was first confined to Djakarta, this is no longer true. It is also used by many students and educated people in other cities, especially by
Preliminaries
those who have at one time or another been to Djakarta. Students studying abroad use it when talking among themselves. Novels and short stories recently published use it in their dialogues. In short, this colloquial speech is spreading to many areas of Indonesia. (Poedjosoedarmo 1982: 142)
Assuming that the spreading of this language variety has continued since Poedjosoedarmo made this observation twenty years ago, I believe I am justified in referring to the data for the present study as Spoken Colloquial Indonesian. The corpus shows this variety being used in informal situations among friends, as well as in more-formal discussion-oriented interaction, and by speakers from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds and regional origins within Indonesia. In general, language attitudes among educated Indonesians tend to be prescriptive, characterized by a strong sense of “correct” and “incorrect”. This is due in large part to the normative policies of Pusat Pembinaan Dan Pengembangan Bahasa (Center for Language Development), the language-planning body of the Indonesian government. The overt mission of this organization is the promotion and standardization of Indonesian, and the development of grammar as a means toward “clear” and “effective” communication. One primary impetus for this policy is the view of Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) as a crucial unifying factor in a multi-ethnic, culturally-diverse society. Results of these policies have, unfortunately, not always been positive from a linguistic standpoint. For example, as I will illustrate briefly in 1.4 below, many of the prescriptive rules of Indonesian grammar, as well as some descriptions of the language, have been tacitly based in grammars of Western languages such as English. Secondly, as sociolinguistic literature abundantly demonstrates, prescriptive traditions tend to lead to moral judgments about the (lack of) value of “nonstandard” language varieties and their speakers (cf. Niedzielski and Preston 2000, and works cited therein). The view of colloquial Indonesian as “nonstandard” has a number of consequences for a researcher wishing to pursue this language variety. A few pieces of anecdotal evidence from my own experience are instructive. First, speakers of Indonesian tend to view the data itself with suspicion. Early in the recording phase of my fieldwork in Yogyakarta, an Indonesian acquaintance asked to hear some of the tapes I had made. This individual is an Indonesian teacher at Pusat Studi Indonesia (Indonesian Study Center) — the department at Universitas Gadjah Mada which is responsible for teaching Indonesian language courses to foreigners. After listening to a few minutes of various speech events, he became extremely agitated. He then expressed the opinion that these recordings are “bad” grammar, and “not really Indonesian”.
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I observed similar reactions from the research assistants, when we first began to gloss the transcriptions. They would frequently offer commentary on the nonstandard language of the data, and would explain what the “correct” forms should be. As the research assistants became more comfortable working with the data, I occasionally met with the opinion that “of course this isn’t really grammar. People don’t use grammar when they talk informally”. While there is no doubt that the data for this study is not formal, standard written Indonesian (bahasa baku), this does not mean that the colloquial, conversational language of the data is in any way less a legitimate language variety or grammatical system worthy of description in its own right. As such, I do not intend to claim that the results of this study are representative of, or applicable to, other genres of Indonesian. Secondly, these normative language attitudes actually constrain the research methodology available to the analyst. Specifically, traditional elicitation-based research (asking a consultant to make up a sentence, or to judge the acceptability of an utterance) is problematic at best. In general, when I attempt to elicit a sentence from a native-speaking consultant, the consultant invariably provides a response in standard Indonesian. When I provide a sentence in colloquial Indonesian (such as those which actually occur in the corpus), the consultant tends to repeat the “correct” form back to me, rather than judging the original sentence. For example, in context of elicitation discussed in Section 2.5.2.2.1, I provided sentences directly from the data whose verbs contained the (nonstandard) applicative suffix -in. One consultant, without exception, repeated the sentence and changed the (nonstandard) -in suffix to either -i or -kan (the applicative suffixes found in standard Indonesian). For other specific examples of shortcomings of attempting to elicit non-standard forms, see the discussion in 2.5.2. Furthermore, if one is to take seriously the findings of Conversation Analysis that grammar arises out of, and is constrained by, social interaction, then elicitation by its very nature is undesirable, since it removes grammar from the social and interactional context which shapes it (cf. the quote from Schegloff previously cited in 1.2). For this reason, and because of the unreliability of eliciting “nonstandard” language, I will rely on a corpus-based, discourseanalytic approach to this language variety. For purposes of this book, it is the corpus data — the actual language produced by real native-speakers in natural interactional context — which is the ultimate authority for what constitutes the grammar of colloquial, conversational Indonesian.
Preliminaries
1.2.3 Basic grammar sketch The aim of this section is to provide a basic overview of some of the key aspects of Indonesian grammar. This section is meant to orient the non-Indonesianist reader to some of the grammatical structures in the corpus, and to facilitate the reading of examples presented in this book. This sketch is necessarily vague for the sake of brevity, and is by no means intended as a comprehensive description of Indonesian grammar. For further details, the interested reader may consult a variety of descriptive and/or pedagogical grammars of standard Indonesian, including Sneddon (1996), Wolff (1986), Moeliono and Dardjowidjojo (1988), Chaer (1988), Alwi et al. (1993), and Verhaar (1984, 1988). In terms of morphological complexity, Indonesian is a predominantly isolating language. There is no morphology to index tense, person, number, or case. This sketch is organized as follows: 1.2.3.1–1.2.3.2 briefly deal with common classes of lexical items encountered in the data, but which I will not discuss further in this sketch (markers of aspect and mood, and discourse particles.) Section 1.2.3.3 outlines the general structure of noun phrases in Indonesian. 1.2.3.4 discusses intransitive clauses and relevant verb morphology, and 1.2.3.5 does the same for transitive clauses. 1.2.3.1Aspect and mood Aspect and mood are generally indicated by means of pre-verbal temporal auxiliaries. These have additional semantic content, from which their aspectual/ modal meanings have presumably grammaticized. Because their “lexical” content and aspectual/modal functions overlap, and because their non-lexical meanings are not well understood and tend not to fit easily into typologies of aspect marking, I will generally gloss them with their closest English literal equivalents. (One exception to this is lagi ‘again’, as in (3) below, which clearly functions as a progressive marker when preverbal.) Following are several examples. (1) illustrates the use of sudah ‘already’ (sometimes expressed informally as udah), which often indicates perfective aspect. Belum ‘not yet’ in (2) indicates the lack of occurrence of an event, but leaves the possibility open that it may still happen now or in the future. This indicates perfect aspect, since the non-occurrence of an event may still hold current and future relevance. Lagi ‘again’ indicates progressive aspect in (3), and mau ‘want’ in (4) indicates future desire, intent, or expectation.
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(1) (“Pencuri” IU 504) Dia kan udah langsung buka dompet gini. 3sg prt already direct open wallet like.this “She opened her wallet right away.” (2) (“Pencuri” IU 2033) Aku juga belum pernah dicopet. 1sg also not.yet ever pt-pickpocket “I’ve never been pickpocketed either.” (3) (“Pencuri” IU 753) Lagi memperbaiki sepeda motor kan, prog at-improve-app bike motor prt “He was fixing his motorcycle.” (4) (“Pencuri” IU 3240) Wah tanggal tiga satu aku mau pulang he. gosh date three one 1sg want go.home prt “Gosh, on the thirty-first I’m going home.”
Negation is indicated by means of three negative particles: bukan for negation of NPs, the auxiliary tidak (with informal variants ndak, nggak, or tak) for negation of predicates which will have no future chance of occurring, and belum ‘not yet’ (presented in (2) above) for the negation of past-time predicates which still have a potential chance of occurring in the future. The following three examples are illustrative. (There are instances in the data where these negative particles occur counter to the standard description of their distribution, but an account of this lies outside the scope of this book.) (5) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 434) Tapi bukan darah. but neg blood “But it’s not blood.” (6) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 737) .. (TSK) (H) Ayat ini tidak salah. verse this neg false “This verse isn’t wrong.” (7) (“Blewah” IU 419) N: … Belum pernah bikin martabak panggang ya? not.yet ever make martabak baked prt “You’ve never made baked martabak?” (martabak = a crepe-like pastry filled with spiced meat)
Preliminaries
1.2.3.2Discourse particles There are numerous discourse particles in the data, whose functions are not well-defined in the literature. (For a characterization of two of them, cf. Wouk 1998, and Wouk 2001.) I will simply gloss these particles as prt, since more specific glosses are as of yet impossible. Frequent ones which will be encountered in the examples in this book include: kan, ya, gitu, itu, lah, lho, and various combinations of these. 1.2.3.3Noun phrases NPs tend to be head initial, although numbers and other quantifiers occur prehead. Determiners occur in final position. Roughly schematized, the structure of Indonesian NPs is: (Quantifier) Noun (Possessor) (Adjective/Relative-Clause) (Determiner)
Here is an example: (8) (“Pencuri” IU 496) Kamu kan pernah lihat pencopet yang di= Koperasi Pemuda itu. 2sg prt ever see pickpocket rel at co-op youth that “Have you ever seen that pickpocket on the Koperasi Pemuda?” (Koperasi Pemuda is the name of a bus line in Yogyakarta.)
So-called “zero anaphora” (leaving the occurrence of an NP to inference) is extremely common, as will be seen in many of the examples presented in this book. 1.2.3.3.1Pronouns. Spoken Indonesian employs a huge variety of pronouns, whose occurrence presumably depends on sociolinguistic factors. For example, all of the following forms occur in the corpus, all used for first-person singular reference: aku, saya, ku, gua, gue, tak, self-reference by use of one’s own name, or lack of an overt referring-expression altogether. Pronouns may be followed by determiners and other modifying elements: (9) (“Pencuri” IU 3333) Dia itu umur kita. 3sg that.dem age 1pl “She’s our age.”
1.2.3.3.2The -nya suffix. The suffix -nya is extremely frequent in the corpus, and will figure prominently in the discussion in Chapter 5. For this reason, I will not deal with it in the grammar sketch, but will instead present a basic
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overview of its functions later, in Section 5.2, including its uses as a marker of possession, identifiability, nominalization, pronominal arguments, and adverbs. Because this clitic has multiple and overlapping functions, and because a given token in the data generally has more than one function, I will not label this clitic with a standard gloss. In all examples in this work, I will gloss -nya eponymously as nya. 1.2.3.4Intransitive clauses Indonesian intransitive clauses may contain either verbal or nonverbal predicates. Verbal predicates may be unaffixed, as in (10) below. These types of predicates tend to comprise “property concepts”, and it is in general not possible to justify the existence of adjectives in Indonesian as a unique wordclass distinct from intransitive verbs. (10) (“Pencuri” IU 132) selama ini aku terlalu polos ya, as.long.as this 1sg too naive prt “If that’s so, then I’ve been too naive.”
Intransitive verbal predicates may also be affixed with any of several prefixes. (11) illustrates ber- (roughly glossed as middle voice), which also serves to make some nouns into intransitive verbs. (12) exemplifies ter-, whose meanings include ‘accidental’ and ‘abilitative’, and which I will gloss ‘nonvolitional’. (13) illustrates a common verbal circumfix, ke- -an, which I will gloss ‘adversative’. Note that the human experiencer of this clause would be considered the S argument, while the other NP would be considered oblique. (11) (“Pencuri” IU 646) Aku berhadapan sama dia. 1sg mid-face with 3sg “I stood facing her.” (12) (“Pencuri” IU 1793) Dia udah tersungkur sampai bawah. 3sg already nonvol-fall.headfirst until below “He fell headfirst to the floor.” (13) (“Pencuri” IU 58) Aku kehilangan lagi dua puluh ribu kan. 1sg advers-lose again twen- -ty thousand prt “I lost another twenty thousand (Rupiah)!” (i.e. it was stolen.)
Preliminaries
Nonverbal predicates of intransitive clauses may consist of NPs, prepositional phrases, quantifier phrases, or adverbs. These are illustrated respectively in the following four examples. Indonesian tends not to use a copula in such constructions, although there is one available — adalah, which is generally restricted to formal varieties of written Indonesian. (14) (“Pencuri” IU 2491–2492) 2491 Kebetulan dia, coincidentally 3sg 2492 itu orang Cina. that.dem person China “He happened to be Chinese.” (15) (“Pencuri” IU 31) Kamu di mana. 2sg at where “Where were you?” (16) (“Pencuri” IU 1011–1012) 1011 Kos Yani kan, boardinghouse Yani prt 1012 dua kamar gitu ya. two room like.that prt “Yani’s boardinghouse has two rooms.” (17) (“Pencuri” IU 634) Agnes kan gini. Agnes prt like.this “Agnes was going like this.”
1.2.3.5Transitive clauses Indonesian transitive verbs often co-occur with prefixes and/or suffixes. 1.2.3.5.1 deals with prefixes, and 1.2.3.5.2 with suffixes. 1.2.3.5.1Transitive prefixes. Indonesian transitive clauses are generally of two types, characterized by the roles of their core arguments and often indicated by verbal prefixes. These clause types have been variously discussed in terms of ‘voice’, ‘focus’, or ‘trigger’. Voice analyses tend to characterize them as active and passive (cf. Sneddon 1996), although an ergative analysis has also been proposed (cf. Cumming and Wouk 1987 for a review and critique.). These constructions, however, function quite differently from canonical actives and
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passives in terms of their discourse functions and distribution, and for this reason, I prefer the more neutral terms ‘Agent Trigger’ and ‘Patient Trigger’ as adopted by e.g. Wouk (1989) and Cumming (1991), inter alia. The ‘trigger’ of a clause is the argument which functions as the “subject”, and is the only argument which can be shared in clause combining. For example, only the trigger of a main clause can (formally) be the head of a relative clause. The trigger of a clause is often indicated by a prefix on the verb. The prefixes N- and meN- both indicate that the agent is the trigger (glossed ‘at’ for Agent Trigger), while the prefix di- indicates that the patient is the trigger (glossed ‘pt’ for Patient Trigger). The N in the agent-trigger prefix represents a nasal, whose place of articulation varies between bilabial, alveolar, palatal, or velar, depending on articulatory aspects of the following phonetic segment. Below are several examples of Agent-Trigger clauses. (18) And (19) illustrate the N- prefix. This is the most common Agent-Trigger prefix in the corpus, and is generally not considered standard Indonesian. N- has been discussed by Wouk (1989) as arising from the Betawi dialect of Malay spoken in Jakarta. (18) (“Pencuri” IU 351) Ari ngomong gitu kan. Ari at-speak like.that prt “I (Ari) spoke thus.” (as a quotative following what it was that she had said.) (19) (“Pencuri” IU 2127) Siapa yang ngambil uangku. who rel at-take money-1sg “Who was it that took my money?”
The Agent-Trigger clauses (20) and (21) illustrate the meN- prefix. This is the Agent-Trigger prefix typically found in formal standard Indonesian. (20) (“Pencuri” IU 693) Kita memp- kayaknya kita mempermainkan mereka gitu lho. 1pl trunc like-nya 1pl at-make.fun-app 3pl like.that prt “It seemed like we were making fun of them.” (21) (“Pencuri” IU 753) Lagi memperbaiki sepeda motor kan, prog at-improve-app bike motor prt “He was fixing his motorcycle.”
Preliminaries
(22)–(25) below illustrate Patient-Trigger clauses with the di- prefix. Sentences (23)–(25) are extremely awkward if translated with the English passive, and therefore I prefer to give idiomatic English translations of these Indonesian Patient-Trigger examples. Cumming (1995: 252) characterizes this awkwardness as a “symptom” of the functional difference between Indonesian PatientTrigger clauses and canonical passives. (22) (“Pencuri” IU 1263) Aku ditahan sama temenku sampingku. 1sg pt-restrain with friend-1sg side-1sg “I was held back by my friend next to me.” (23) (“Pencuri” IU 30) Ya masalahnya dompetku udah mau ditarik dia. yes problem-nya wallet-1sg already want pt-pull 3sg “Yeah, the problem is, she was about to pull out my wallet.” (24) (“Pencuri” IU 2822) nanti aku dibawa ke tempat kayak gitu, later 1sg pt-bring to place like like.that “Take me to a place like that later!” (25) (“Pencuri” IU 1629–1630) 1629 Mau ditelponin temennya yang gali itu tapi, want pt-telephone-app friend-nya rel criminal that.dem but 1630 pas nggak ada di tempat. exact neg ex at place “She was going to call that criminal friend of hers for me, but he wasn’t there then.”
In grammars of standard Indonesian, the pronominal prefix ku- ‘1sg’ indicates the first-person agent of a patient-trigger clause, as in the following: (26) (“Pencuri” IU 746) memang kupaksa tidur di rumah, indeed 1sg.pt-force sleep at house “I made her sleep at my house.”
The trigger ‘3sg’ in the above example is not overtly present, and the prefix ku‘1sg’ represents the non-trigger argument (in this case the agent). We have already observed in (24)–(25) above, that non-trigger arguments can be absent from a clause. There are also examples where the trigger argument itself is not present, as in (26) above, and (27) below.
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(27) (“Pencuri” IU 1268) Malah dipukul dikeroyok sama temen-temennya itu. in.fact pt-beat pt-gang.up with friend.redup-nya that.dem “In fact, his friends will gang up on you and beat you up.”
In some instances, both the trigger and non-trigger arguments are not present: (28) (“Pencuri” IU 506) Diperiksa gini lho. pt-examine like.this prt “She looked at it like this.”
Many of the transitive clauses in the corpus are not marked by trigger morphology at all. For instance, both clauses in the following example are transitive, but do not have trigger morphology. (In standard Indonesian, both could be expressed as Agent-Trigger clauses.) (29) (“Pencuri” IU 606–608) 606 Dia kan, 3sg prt 607 beli semangka. buy watermelon 608 Satu tangannya pegang semangka, one hand-nya hold watermelon “She bought a watermelon. One of her hands was holding the watermelon.”
The frequent lack of verb morphology, combined with the frequent “zero anaphora” of arguments, leads to a good deal of indeterminacy, both in terms of voice as well as argument structure (cf. Cumming and Englebretson 1998; see also Ewing 1999 for a similar point about Cirebon Javanese). In the colloquial conversational data, it is often not possible to discern what the arguments of a verb are, and whether the verb is A- or P-trigger. Cumming and Englebretson (1998) have suggested that perhaps such categories are not relevant for speakers in the context of the interaction, when they are not overtly signaled. 1.2.3.5.2Transitive suffixes. There are three suffixes on Indonesian transitive verbs which regularly occur in the corpus: -in, -kan, and -i. Of the three suffixes, -in is considered non-standard, while -i and -kan both occur in standard Indonesian as well. These suffixes tend to be lexically restricted as to which verbs they can affix to, and have different meanings depending on the verb. All of these I will gloss as ‘applicative’, since they tend to be valence-increasing morphemes
Preliminaries
with functions such as causative, benefactive, and dative shift. An example of the -in suffix occurs in (25) above, and also in (30) below. -kan and -i have already appeared in (20) and (21), which I will repeat below as (31) and (32). (30) (“Pencuri” IU 788) Dia pura-pura aja baikin. 3sg pretend only good-app “He was only pretending to fix it.” (31) (“Pencuri” IU 693) Kita memp- kayaknya kita mempermainkan mereka gitu lho. 1pl trunc like-nya 1pl at-make.fun-app 3pl like.that prt “It seemed like we were making fun of them.” (32) (“Pencuri” IU 753) Lagi memperbaiki sepeda motor kan, prog at-improve-app bike motor prt “He was fixing his motorcycle.”
1.3 Complementation in functional linguistics The aim of this section is to define the terms complementation and complement for purposes of this study, and to situate my work within the context of previous functionalist research on this topic. This overview is by no means exhaustive, but focuses primarily on typological and cross-linguistic research. It does not address the abundant generative literature, which would cover a variety of studies beginning with Rosenbaum (1967) and continuing to the present. (Specific issues regarding complementation in various generative paradigms may be found in Geest et al. (1984) and Jaspers et al. (1989). Also, see Felser (1999) for a recent discussion of complementation within the Minimalist Program.) I will also not be addressing the considerable variety of languagespecific work on complementation — functional or otherwise. This section is meant as a brief overview of functionalist studies of complementation, each of which raises specific questions and issues for the Indonesian data. Noonan (1985) provides a typological overview of complement constructions. His definition of complementation, cited above, and repeated here for ease of reference, is representative of all the research discussed in this section, and is the definition I adopt in this book as well: “the syntactic situation that arises when a notional sentence or predication is an argument of a predicate” (1985: 42). ‘Argument’ here denotes the subject or object of a predicate, and the
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term complement therefore refers specifically to these clausal arguments. For the remainder of this book, the operational definition of complement is: a clause which serves as the subject or object of another clause. The main areas addressed in functionalist complementation research generally deal with (i) the structural (morphosyntactic) characteristics of complements, (ii) the semantics of main versus complement clauses and how their relationship is conceptualized, (iii) the role of complementation in modality, and (iv) the question of the universality of complementation across languages. Noonan’s discussion touches on these four larger questions as well, and centers primarily around the morphological and syntactic characterization of complements cross-linguistically. Noonan describes a variety of morphosyntactic complement types, ranging from S-like complements (those which are similar to independent main clauses) to various reduced complements, including paratactic, serial, infinitival, nominalized, and participial complement clauses. Semantically, he provides an overview of 12 types of common complement-taking predicates (CTPs), and a brief discussion of the use and development of complementizers. In terms of language universals, Noonan claims that all languages have at least two types of complement constructions: “All languages have an S-like indicative complement type, and all languages have some sort of reduced complement type in opposition to the indicative” (1985: 133). Similar to Noonan, Givón addresses complementation from a crosslinguistic perspective. Much of his research in this area explicates the relationship between the grammar and semantics of complementation and argues for the iconicity of grammar and conceptualization. For Givón (1980, 1990, 2001b) grammatical complementation serves the purpose of signaling the semantic integration between events. He argues that the forms of complements are not random, but are iconically grounded in cognitive principles. Namely, “The stronger is the semantic bond between the two events, the more extensive will be the syntactic integration of the two clauses into a single though complex clause” (Givón 2001b: 40). Givón proposes a semantic scale of event integration, which he calls the ‘binding hierarchy’. In his 1980 paper, he presents crosslinguistic data demonstrating how different grammatical structures are used to code different ranges along this scale. In this view, it is the semantics of the CTP which determines the semantic and syntactic integration of the complement into the matrix clause. The ‘binding hierarchy’ consists of three overlapping scales, defined by three semantic types of CTPs: manipulative verbs (e.g. ‘make’, ‘force’, ‘order’, ‘ask’), modality verbs (e.g. ‘want’, ‘begin’, ‘finish’, ‘try), and perception-cognition-utterance (PCU) verbs (e.g. ‘think’, ‘know’, ‘say’). On
Preliminaries
each of these three scales, verbs are ranked according to the conceptualization of their actions as a single spacio-temporal event (at the top of the scale) or as separate events (at the bottom of the scale). Factors leading to this ranking include: the degree of control which the matrix agent exerts over the agent of the complement clause, with high control at the top of the scale and low control at the bottom; epistemicity, with high speaker commitment at the top and low speaker commitment at the bottom; and implicativity, the top of the scale containing verbs which refer to successfully-completed actions, and the bottom of the scale including those verbs which code merely the intended completion of an action. For each of the three scales — manipulative, modality, and perception-cognition-utterance — complements at the top are tightly integrated with the matrix clause, while those at the bottom behave more like main clauses. These three scales together form the binding hierarchy. The top of the binding hierarchy consists of the manipulative scale and the modality scale, which parallel each other. The cognition-utterance scale forms the lower end of the binding hierarchy, with its upper end overlapping with the lower ends of the manipulative and modality scales. Givón depicts the relationship among the three scales of the binding hierarchy as shaped like a tuning fork (2001b: 41). Semantically, CTPs at the top of the hierarchy (the upper end of the manipulative and modality scales) are conceptualized as one event, while those at the bottom of the hierarchy (the lower end of the perception-cognition-utterance scale) are conceptualized as discrete events. Syntactically, then, complements with CTPs at the upper end of the binding hierarchy are more tightly integrated as a single clause, while the CTPs at the lower end of the binding hierarchy permit greater independence between matrix and complement. Givón lists four syntactic factors, which he claims are universally used to encode integration versus separation respectively of the clauses: (i) co-lexicalization versus separation of matrix and complement verbs, (ii) case-marking of complement agent/subject as an argument of the CTP versus of the complement verb, (iii) morphologically marking the complement verb as infinitive versus finite, (iv) the absence versus presence of ‘subordinating morphemes’ (complementizers) or intonation breaks. These are the grammatical factors which Givón claims are an iconic reflection of the semantically-based binding hierarchy. Within the Cognitive Grammar framework, Langacker (1991, 1999) also analyzes complementation as a reflection of conceptual structure. Langacker characterizes complement clauses as “conceptually subordinate” to the CTP:
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By the very nature of a complement clause, the process it describes undergoes a kind of conceptual subordination: rather than being viewed in its own terms as an independent object of thought, it is primarily considered for the role it plays within the superordinate relationship expressed by the main clause. Viewing the subordinate process as a main-clause participant implies a conceptual distancing whereby this process is construed holistically and manipulated as a unitary entity. (Langacker 1991: 441)
According to Langacker, the grammar of complementation reflects this conceptual subordination in terms of grammatical subordination, in which the complement clause is grammatically subordinate to a CTP. Again, as stated in a recent work, “the complement is fully prefigured by the head, which provides the ‘lens’ through which the complement is viewed” (Langacker 1999: 243). One recent application of the Cognitive Grammar framework is Achard (1998), who undertakes a description of the various complementation constructions in French. Achard characterizes the meaning and conceptualization of each construction and demonstrates the interrelation between different types of verbs and the different types of complement clauses with which they co-occur. Dixon (1995) is the first author I know of to provide a description of a language which does not make use of grammatical complementation. According to Dixon, Dyirbal is a language with no complements per se, but which uses ‘complementation strategies’ — other grammatical resources to code the range of semantic functions which are coded by complements in other languages. The impetus for this work is Dixon’s view that all languages have to express roughly the same, universal, range of semantic concepts, and the observation that not all languages do this by means of the same grammatical resources. Dixon begins with a discussion of the semantics of complements in English and Fijian, two languages which do make use of the grammatical resource of complementation. He then turns to a discussion of the two ‘complementation strategies’ which Dyirbal employs to encode these same semantic functions: (i) two main clauses linked by a purposive marker, and (ii) relative clauses serving as matrix-clause arguments. In order to understand what Dixon considers to be the function of complementation, I must first give some background about his approach to grammar (fully articulated in his 1991 grammar of English, and summarized in Dixon 1995). Dixon divides verbs into two semantic classes: Primary and Secondary. In many languages, including English, Primary verbs are in turn divided into two groups: Primary-A verbs and Primary-B verbs. Primary-A verbs are those which are used to describe actions or states of entities, and therefore only take NPs as arguments. This class includes Corporeal verbs, verbs of motion, affect,
Preliminaries
and giving, among others. Primary-B verbs are verbs which describe actions or feelings which can relate to either entities or actions and states, and thus can either take NP or predicate arguments. These include verbs of attention, thinking, deciding, liking, and speaking. Secondary concepts (which are often expressed as verbs, but sometimes may be expressed in some languages as verbal affixes, adverbials, modals, or non-inflecting clausal particles) semantically modify the meaning of primary verbs, e.g. ‘can’, ‘try’, ‘begin’, ‘finish’, ‘not’, ‘make’ and many others. These secondary concepts cannot be used alone as a single verb in a sentence, and thus “demand a grammatical link to another verb” (Dixon 1995: 176). This “grammatical link” — between secondary-verb and another verb, or between primary-B verb and another verb — is the semantic function Dixon identifies for complementation: “The semantic task of complement-clause constructions is to code the relation between a matrix verb (whether of Primary-B or Secondary type) and the complement-clause verb” (1995: 178). In languages which utilize complementation as a grammatical resource, this “link” is grammatically encoded by complements. In languages which do not utilize complementation, Dixon claims this “link” is expressed by other “complementation strategies”, such as relativization or nominalization of what would be the complement-clause, and its subsequent embedding into the clause containing the CTP. Another avenue of functionalist research concerns the role of complementation in the expression of modality. Ransom (1986) is one such researcher, who claims that complementation should be characterized solely in terms of modality. The primary goal of her study is to exhaustively characterize the many and varied complement types in terms of a small number of semantic primitives: “In spite of the multiplicity of meanings and forms that one sees on the surface tapestry, if one looks at the underlying complement modality meanings, one can find logical patterns…” (1986: 29). Ransom claims that there are two types of modality meanings: the ‘information modalities’, which “describe information about someone’s knowledge or behavior in the world” and the ‘evaluation modalities’, which “describe evaluations of alternatives” (1986: 16). Each of these two modality types has four possibilities. The Information Modalities consist of ‘Truth’, ‘Future Truth’, ‘Occurrence’, and ‘Action’, while the Evaluation Modalities consist of ‘Predetermined’, ‘Determined’, ‘Undetermined’, and ‘Indeterminate’. For Ransom, all complement clauses are characterized in terms of combinations of these two modality types, thus giving sixteen possible permutations. The various forms of complement clauses (e.g. S-like, infinitive, participial, etc.) and the choice of complementizer, are
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predictable based on which of the 16 modality permutations characterize the complement proposition. Ransom’s approach is interesting, in that she demonstrates that complement types do not simply ‘fall out’ from the CTP, as most generative linguists, as well as functionalists like Givón (1980, 1990, 2001b) and Dixon (1995) suggest. Like Ransom, Frajzyngier (1995) accords modality an important role in the distribution of complement types. His central claim is that complementizers themselves have inherent modality meanings. Rather than being devices for merely indicating a complement clause (Noonan 1985), or for coding iconic “separation” of main and complement clause (Givón 1980, 1990, 2001b), Frajzyngier views the function of complementizers as modality markers. On this basis, he proceeds to argue that the complementizer is actually in complementary distribution with other modality markers, and therefore languages show a strong tendency not to use complementizers in clauses whose modality is marked by other devices. Frajzyngier’s approach is interesting, in that he is the only researcher I know of to treat complementizers themselves as containing their own modality meanings independent from those of the CTP or complement clause. Thompson and Mulac (1991a, 1991b) are the first researchers I am aware of to have examined complements in naturally-occurring conversational data. Both of these studies are empirically-based statistical analyses of certain types of complement constructions in a large corpus of spoken American English. Thompson and Mulac (1991a) argue that the presence or absence of the English complementizer ‘that’ is not a matter of optionality, as many researchers in the generative paradigm have claimed. Rather, absence of ‘that’ correlates highly with factors related to speaker commitment/epistemicity, including the presence of matrix subjects ‘I’ and ‘you’, the use of matrix verbs ‘think’ and ‘guess’, and the discourse-topicality of the complement subject. Thompson and Mulac argue that complements without ‘that’ are being reanalyzed as adverbials, “unitary epistemic phrases” (1991a: 249) rather than as a main clause introducing a complement. Therefore the boundary between complement clauses and epistemic adverbial constructions is extremely fuzzy. Thompson and Mulac (1991b) further explicate their findings of English complement clauses grammaticizing into epistemic adverbial phrases (EPs). Evidence of this grammaticization comes from the use of EPs as Epistemic Parentheticals (EPARs), which occur in positions in the clause other than immediately preceding the complement clause. Using the same database as in the 1991A study, they argue that “the blurring of the distinction between ‘main’
Preliminaries
and ‘complement’ clause … is precisely what is involved in creating the conditions which are giving rise to EPs” (1991b: 316). The authors give two types of evidence to support their claim. First, the subject-verb combinations which occur most frequently without ‘that’ are the same as those which occur as EPARs. This relationship is shown to be highly statistically significant. Secondly, the EPs which occur as EPARs have semantics related to evidentiality. In sum, “the evidence suggests that the most frequent subjects and verbs occurring with what syntacticians have considered to be ‘that-less’ complements … have in fact been reanalyzed by speakers as epistemic phrases, which have a degree of freedom not possible for subject-verb combinations; in particular they are ‘free’ to occur in other positions, just as other epistemic phrases, such as epistemic adverbs, do in English” (1991b: 317). Thus Thompson and Mulac argue Epistemic Phrases are no longer considered to be complements, since their distribution is different from other complement constructions. Rather, EPs should be considered a “grammatical sub-category of adverbs” (1991b: 324). Thompson (2002) argues that there is little evidence, even in spoken English, for a grammatical category of complement clause. The database for this study consists of 425 clauses from English conversation which would traditionally be analyzed as complement constructions. She suggests that these putative complements are in fact best not analyzed as clausal arguments at all, but rather that the CTP is an epistemic/evidential fragment. Based on a ConversationAnalytic approach to the data, Thompson claims that it is in fact the complement clause which is performing the bulk of the work in the interaction, and to which the interlocutors are orienting. The CTP, on the other hand, is serving as a marker of epistemicity/evidentiality. This finding calls into question the traditional view that the ‘complement clause’ is “conceptually subordinate” to the CTP, since it is this clause itself which is doing the bulk of the interactional work. In sum, for Noonan, Givón, Langacker, and Dixon, complementation is essentially a grammatical phenomenon coded by morphosyntax. For each of these authors, it is the semantics of the CTP (Complement-Taking Predicate) which motivates and determines the grammatical form of the complement. These authors differ on the universality of complements. Noonan claims that every language has two types of complements: an S-like complement similar to an independent main clause, and a reduced complement in opposition to it. Givón claims that all languages use 4 universal morphosyntactic means to encode the integration or separation of CTPs and their propositional arguments, based on a universal binding hierarchy of semantic event integration.
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Dixon, in contrast to Noonan and Givón, overtly states that morphosyntactic complementation is not universal, and cites several languages which do not make use of this grammatical resource (Dixon 1995: 183). Instead, Dixon claims that languages which do not have grammatical complements will use ‘complementation strategies’ to signal the semantic relationship coded by complements in other languages. (To my knowledge, Langacker is silent as to this debate.) The remaining authors, Ransom, Frajzyngier, Thompson and Mulac, and Thompson, focus on the relationship between complementation and modality. For Ransom, there are two sets of four modality types, the 16 combinations of which determine the choice of complementizer as well as the morphosyntactic form of the complement. Frajzyngier views complementizers as coding modality, suggesting that complementizers themselves have specific modality meanings and determine the form of the complement. Thompson and Mulac suggest that the function of some CTPs as coding epistemic modality has led to their grammaticization into adverbial phrases and epistemic parentheticals. Thompson takes this approach even further, and argues against a category of grammatical complements in English, claiming instead that the CTP is an epistemic/ evidential marker. Thompson, and Thompson and Mulac, are the only researchers I am aware of who overtly recognize the fuzzy boundaries of complements and their potential grammaticization into other functions. They are also the only researchers who have examined complementation in naturallyoccurring conversational data.
1.4 Complementation in Indonesian linguistics The aim of the next two subsections is to address the terminological confusion surrounding the terms komplementasi ‘complementation’ and komplemen ‘complement’ in the Indonesianist literature. Readers familiar with Indonesian reference grammars and/or Indonesian linguistics have undoubtedly encountered these terms. Unfortunately, different authors have used these terms with a diverse array of meanings — usually not consistent between authors, and generally not in keeping with the definition of complementation assumed in the wider linguistics literature. For this reason, different authors’ observations about complements are not compatible with each other, and are not generalizable beyond the studies in which they occur. I will address two recent works here — one written in English (Sneddon’s 1996 reference grammar of Indonesian), and one written in Indonesian (Sugono and Indiyastini’s 1994 study of
Preliminaries
verb complementation in a written Indonesian corpus). With this section, I wish to acknowledge the terminological quagmire which exists in the literature, and also to be very explicit about what I mean by these terms in the present study. When I use the term complementation in this book, I specifically mean the grammatical situation of one clause serving as the subject or object of another. Complement, likewise, refers to the clause in such constructions, which serves as the subject or object of a main clause. This is strictly a syntactic definition, with precedence in all of the literature reviewed above in 1.3, as well as in the generative literature since Rosenbaum (1967). 1.4.1 Sneddon In his (1996) reference grammar of Indonesian, Sneddon provides the following definition of complement. Unfortunately, he does not cite any literature or precedence outside of his grammar to justify this definition. A complement is a clause component which resembles an object but which cannot become the subject of a passive clause. Complements occur in transitive and intransitive clauses and also in adjective clauses. A complement can be an adjective phrase, a noun phrase or a verbal clause. A complement is almost always obligatory to the construction in which it occurs. (Sneddon 1996: 265)
The italicized portions of the following three examples illustrate units which meet this definition of complement. (33) (Sneddon 1996: 64; gloss mine) Dia bernama Ali. 3sg mid-name Ali “He is named Ali.” (34) (Sneddon 1996: 269; gloss mine) Mereka merasa puas. 3pl at-feel satisfied “They feel satisfied.” (35) (Sneddon 1996: 296; gloss mine) Bung Karno berpesan agar Dewi menasihati Martono. Bung Karno mid-instruction purp Dewi at-advice-app Martono “Bung Karno gave instructions that Dewi advise Martono.”
Thus, according to Sneddon’s definition, the italicized portions of these examples are complements. They are clausal elements occurring after the verb, but are not objects since they cannot become the trigger of a P-trigger clause.
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The ability of post-verbal elements to be “passivized” is the crucial dividing-line for Sneddon between the category of complement and object. The following three examples illustrate this distinction; bahasa Perancis ‘French’ in (36) is a complement because it does not have a “passive” counterpart, while this same NP in (37) is an object because this particular sentence has a “passive” counterpart given in (38). (I have italicized the complement in (36), but not the object in the other examples.) (36) (Sneddon 1996: 266; gloss mine) Banyak siswa belajar bahasa Perancis. many student mid-study language French “Many students study French.” (37) (Sneddon 1996: 266; gloss mine) Banyak siswa mempelajari bahasa Perancis. many student at-study-app language French “Many students study French.” (38) (Sneddon 1996: 266; gloss mine) Bahasa Perancis dipelajari banyak siswa. language French pt-study-app many student “French is studied by many students.”
Thus, for Sneddon, bahasa Perancis ‘French’ is a complement in (36), but an object in (37). In addition to a complement’s inability to be “passivized”, Sneddon also claims that a clause is incomplete without its complement. This helps to distinguish “complement clauses” from “subordinate clauses” as follows: The complement is an essential part of the clause; if it is omitted the construction is incomplete. On the other hand a subordinate clause, while adding further information, is not obligatory. (Sneddon 1996: 274)
Sneddon offers no side-by-side examples to illustrate this distinction, so I have culled one example of each from their respective sections of his grammar. According to the distinction cited above, (39) contains a complement clause introduced by the conjunction agar ‘so that’, while (40) contains a subordinate clause introduced by this same conjunction. (39) (Sneddon 1996: 296; gloss mine) Bung Karno berpesan agar Dewi menasihati Martono. Bung Karno mid-instruction purp Dewi at-advice-app Martono “Bung Karno gave instructions that Dewi advise Martono.”
Preliminaries
(40) (Sneddon 1996: 344; gloss mine) Kami berangkat pagi-pagi agar kami tidak terlambat. 1pl.x mid-depart morning.redup purp 1pl.x neg nonvol-late “We set off early in the morning so that we wouldn’t be late.”
According to Sneddon’s definition then, the clause in (39) is a complement because it is “obligatory”, while the clause in (40) is a “subordinate clause” because it is not obligatory. Another factor Sneddon uses to distinguish complement clauses and subordinate clauses is that the former always must occur after the main clause, while the latter can occur preceding it. To summarize, there are at least four significant differences between Sneddon’s definition of complement and the one I am using in this book. First, for Sneddon, a complement can comprise a variety of grammatical units (NPs, phrases, and predicates), while in the standard view of complements, they must consist of a clause (minimally a predicate, which may or may not have other arguments present), and “bare NP” arguments and prepositional phrases would not meet the standard definition. Secondly, for Sneddon, a complement is different from an object because it cannot be passivized, while in the standard definition, complements are in fact objects or subjects. Thirdly, Sneddon differentiates between complement clause and subordinate clause, while according to the standard approach, a complement clause is, by definition, also subordinate. Fourthly, Sneddon’s principle of complements being “obligatory” is not shared by the standard definition. 1.4.2 Sugono and Indiyastini To my knowledge, the only published work in Indonesian on the subject of complementation is Sugono and Indiyastini (1994). This is a 49-page booklet published by Pusat Pembinaan Dan Pengembangan Bahasa (Center for Language Development), entitled Verba dan Komplementasinya (roughly translated ‘verbs and their complementation’). This work is commendable in that it is a data-oriented study, based on a corpus of written Indonesian from various sources. The authors seek a general description of the semantic and syntactic properties of verbs and their patterns of complementation. However, what these authors mean by the term ‘complement’ and ‘complementation’ is again not the standard definition assumed in this book, and it is also different from the definition adopted by Sneddon (1996). For these authors, the term komplemen ‘complement’ essentially refers to everything in the predicate besides the verb. In this view, sentences consist of
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three parts: subject, verb, and complement. “Sebagai pengisi predikat, verba disertai oleh subjek dan diiringi oleh komplemen.” [As core of the predicate, verbs are accompanied by subjects and followed by complements.] (Sugono and Indiyastini 1994: 7; translation mine) Komplementasi ‘complementation’, on the other hand, is defined as follows: Komplementasi dapat diartikan proses pelengkapan makna verba dalam satu klausa atau kalimat agar informasi menjadi lengkap. Komplementasi dapat juga diartikan unsur yang melengkapi makna verba. Dengan demikian, komplementasi tidak sama dengan pelengkap dalam klausa. Pelengkap itu merupakan salah satu fungsi sintaksis dalam klausa. Komplementasi di sini mengacu pada konstituen (kata, frasa, atau klausa) yang mengikuti verba, dan konstituen itu berfungsi melengkapi spesifikasi hubungan makna yang terkandung dalam verba itu. …Dengan kata lain, kehadiran konstituen komplementasi ini tidak berkaitan langsung dengan kelengkapan bentuk kalimat, tetapi berkaitan dengan kelengkapan makna kalimat. [Complementation is understood as the process of the completion the meaning of the verb in a clause or sentence, so that the information is complete. Complementation is also understood as the element which completes the meaning of a verb. For this reason, complementation is not the same as the complement of a clause. The complement takes on the role of one of the syntactic functions within the clause. Complementation here refers to the constituent (word, phrase, or clause) which follows the verb, and that constituent functions to complete the specification of the meaning relation which is contained in the verb. …In other words, the presence of this complementation constituent is not related directly to the completion of the form of a sentence, but is related to the completion of the sentence’s meaning]. (Sugono and Indiyastini 1994: 17; translation mine)
This definition is nearly identical to that offered by Quirk et al. (1985) in their A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. The authors acknowledge this work as an impetus for their own research (Sugono and Indiyastini 1994: 10), and it seems to constitute a primary source of much of the terminology adopted for their monograph. This is an example of the unfortunate tendency of some Indonesian scholars to base their grammatical descriptions on those of Western languages (especially English). Quirk et al.’s definition of complementation follows: We reserve the term complementation (as distinct from complement) for the function of a part of a phrase or clause which follows a word, and completes the specification of a meaning relationship which that word implies. As such, complementation may be either obligatory or optional on the syntactic level. (Quirk et al. 1985: 65)
Preliminaries
Thus, for Sugono and Indiyastini, complementation refers to the semantic process of making the meaning of a sentence “complete”, and is independent from syntactic factors. The italicized portions of the following four examples are considered complementation by Sugono and Indiyastini. (41) (Sugono and Indiyastini 1994: 17; gloss and translation mine) Ia meneguk isi cangkirnya. 3sg at-swallow contents cup-nya “He swallowed the contents of his cup.” (42) (Sugono and Indiyastini 1994: 17; gloss and translation mine) Aku menuju ke ruang film. 1sg at-aim to space film “I’m headed for the movie room.” (43) (Sugono and Indiyastini 1994: 17; gloss and translation mine) Aku merasa kesepian sekali. 1sg at-feel lonely very “I feel very lonely.” (44) (Sugono and Indiyastini 1994: 17; gloss and translation mine) Dia mengganjalkan bantal itu ke punggungnya. 3sg at-wedge-app pillow that.dem to back-nya “he wedged that pillow under his back.”
The authors claim that the meaning of the verbs in these sentences is not complete without the italicized constituents, and thus these constituents represent the complementation of these verbs. These constituents can take on a variety of forms; as demonstrated by these examples respectively: an NP, a prepositional phrase, an intransitive clause, and a constituent comprised of an NP followed by a prepositional phrase. One major difference between this definition, and Sneddon’s use of the term as discussed in the previous section, has to do with the grammatical role of complements. For Sneddon, ‘complement’ and ‘object’ are mutuallyexclusive: constituents which are objects (i.e. which can become the trigger of a P-trigger clause) cannot be complements. For Sugono and Indiyastini, on the other hand, complementation is completely independent from syntactic roles, and they provide specific examples of a verb’s complementation taking the form of an object: Objek adalah unsur kalimat yang wajib hadir di belakang predikat verba transitif, objek ini akan menjadi subjek jika kalimatnya menjadi kalimat pasif. Verba
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seperti menyampaikan, mencintai, mengambil, dan mempertimbangkan memerlukan komplementasi yang berupa objek. [The object is the element of the sentence which is required to be present after a transitive verbal predicate. This object will become the subject if the sentence becomes passive. Verbs like ‘convey information’, ‘be in love with’, ‘take’, and ‘mull over’ require complementation in the form of an object]. (Sugono and Indiyastini 1994: 44; translation mine)
Following are two examples of verbs whose complementation is an object. (45) (Sugono and Indiyastini 1994: 44; gloss and translation mine) Aku cuma menyampaikan pesan. 1sg only at-arrive-app message “I’m only conveying the message.” (46) (Sugono and Indiyastini 1994: 44; gloss and translation mine) Seluruh dunia mencintai pemimpin-pemimpin kami. all.of world at-love-app leader.redup 1pl.x “All the world loves our leaders.”
The italicized NP in each of these examples, according to Sugono and Indiyastini, represents the verb’s complementation, since they complete the meaning of the verb. In both cases, the complementation constituent is an object, since it could become the trigger of a P-trigger clause. To summarize, Sugono and Indiyastini’s approach is profoundly different from the standard definition of complementation assumed in this book. Most significantly, for these authors, complementation is purely a semantic process, referring to the specification and completion of a verb’s meaning by an additional component of the predicate. Secondly, these components can comprise a constituent at any level — “word, phrase, or clause”, and are not limited to clauses functioning as arguments (minimally a predicate and its optional arguments) as assumed by the standard definition. To conclude, I have discussed two different approaches to complementation found in the Indonesianist literature. By so doing, I hope to shed light on the confusion which presently exists regarding this terminology, and to clarify the definitions I am using for this book.
1.5 Contents of the book This chapter has introduced terminology and concepts as background for the rest of the book. I have provided a description and discussion of the data, a
Preliminaries
basic sketch of Indonesian grammar, and a contextualization of my research within general functionalist work on complementation. The remaining five chapters in the book are organized as follows. The subsequent two chapters deal with constructions which are traditionally analyzed as S-like (sentential) complements. The fourth chapter deals with verbs in series, which are often claimed to be reduced complements. The structures in Chapters 2–4 also fulfill a range of functions commonly attributed to complements cross-linguistically. The fifth chapter deals with a construction which has never been viewed in terms of complementation, despite the fact that it fulfills similar semantic functions to complement constructions in other languages. Chapter 2 deals with juxtaposed clauses, which have no overt grammatical indications of how they are related. Many of these have traditionally been analyzed as complements with no complementizer. I will argue that interclausal relations for these constructions are simply inferential, based on semantic and pragmatic factors. As such, these constructions offer no evidence for complementation as a robust grammatical category for Indonesian speakers. In Chapter 3, I take up the issue of complementizers — connective markers to indicate that one clause is to be understood as an argument of another. I present a close analysis of the word bahwa, and suggest that this form is best analyzed as a discourse marker. Its putative function as a complementizer simply falls out from the general, discourse-structuring functions that it otherwise fulfills, and it provides no evidence for grammatical complementation. Chapter 4 addresses Indonesian serial verbs. Despite their functional similarity to what have been termed ‘reduced complements’, I argue that the structural evidence does not support a biclausal analysis where the second verb is an argument of the first. Rather, the data suggests that Indonesian verbs in series are best understood as occurring in a single clause with a complex predicate. In Chapter 5, I discuss ‘complementation strategies’ (cf. Dixon 1995). I present an analysis of one extremely frequent construction, which I refer to as the epistemic -nya construction. Despite its formal difference from traditional complementation, I suggest its functional similarities to complements make it a good candidate for a ‘complementation strategy’ in Indonesian. Chapter 6 reviews the specific findings of this study for colloquial conversational Indonesian, and discusses the general consequences of these findings for our understanding of the nature of grammar and linguistic categories.
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Chapter 2
Juxtaposed clauses
2.1 Introduction In this chapter I will examine juxtaposed clauses in the Indonesian corpus — clauses which appear to have some sort of semantic or pragmatic relation between them, but which do not contain any overt connective marking to signal this relation. Juxtaposed clauses are by far the most frequent construction type in the corpus which would traditionally be construed as complements. Such juxtaposed clauses would be analyzed as instances of complementation, the first clause taking the second as a core argument. According to this view, complementation is signaled by juxtaposition. This is putatively a result of the “optionality” of complementizers; “some complement types may have no complementizer associated with them at all” (Noonan 1985: 45). I will address the issue of complementizers in Chapter 3, but in the present chapter I will show that the fact that clauses are in a series does not signal anything intrinsic about complementation. To unquestioningly assume that juxtaposed clauses bear a grammatical relation to each other as complements is an overly structural approach to Indonesian grammar, which does not receive empirical support from the data. In any natural discourse, clauses occur in series simply by virtue of the temporal nature of language production. (Of course, in multi-party spoken language there are also plenty of instances of overlap, and non-clausal material as well, but I will not deal with these for the present study, which seeks to focus on grammar above the level of the clause.) Elements of a discourse, whether clausal or otherwise, are understood within their local context of occurrence. To maintain a coherent discourse, interlocutors assume coherence and relevance, and draw inferences about the nature of how elements are related (cf. Grice 1975, Sperber and Wilson 1995, inter alia). Research in Rhetorical Structure Theory has further demonstrated that rhetorical relations still hold between propositions even when not signaled by a connective marker (Mann and Thompson 1986), and Halliday (1994) makes a similar point for relations in clause complexes. Givón also recognizes the interrelatedness of utterances in
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discourse: “In connected natural discourse, the total independence of any clause, be it most loosely connected, from its environment is a mirage, an artifice created by the linguist. A clause that is thematically — pragmatically — independent of all other clauses in connected discourse is a sure locus of incoherence. Therefore, the thematic dependency — connectivity, coherence — of a clause relative to its immediate discourse context can be taken for granted” (Givón 1993: 317). Sometimes the relationship between clauses is overtly indicated by conjunctions, connectives, or discourse markers, but more often in the database this relationship is left to contextual inference on the part of the interlocutors. Juxtaposed clauses in the data encode a wide range of relations, including conditionals, adversatives, concessives, temporally sequenced clauses, and the framed instantiations often associated semantically with complements — all with no overt morphosyntactic marking. I will argue in this chapter that there is nothing special or unique about juxtaposed clauses to justify analyzing juxtaposition as signaling a grammatical category of complementation in Indonesian.
2.2 Examples of juxtaposed clauses I will limit the discussion in this chapter to juxtaposed clauses, roughly defined here as a series of clauses which can stand on their own as main clauses and which show intervening material between the verbs of the two clauses (such as arguments, obliques, or prosodic and/or morphosyntactic separation). The analytical catch-22 of these constructions concerns the extent to which they should be analyzed as a single complex sentence with a “matrix” clause and an “embedded” clause, or as two separate clauses. These are different from instances of verbs in series, which will be discussed in Chapter 4; verbs in series present another range of issues from the clauses in series discussed in the present chapter, namely whether they should be analyzed as separate and subordinate clauses, or as a single clause with a complex predicate. I will begin this chapter by presenting several examples of clauses in series which appear to fulfill the semantic function traditionally attributed to the grammatical category of complementation. Then I will show parallel examples having a variety of interclausal relations. I will then further characterize these clauses in terms of prosody, semantics, and morphosyntax and will present evidence that these should not be understood as instances of grammatical complementation.
Juxtaposed clauses
2.2.1 Framed instantiations The following three examples illustrate juxtaposed clauses which have traditionally been analyzed as complements. There are 263 such examples in the corpus. In Sections 2.3–2.5 I will attempt to characterize the relationship between such clauses, and will address the issue of whether these constructions are in fact best analyzed as grammatical complements. The present section serves to exemplify this construction and to contrast it with other instances of juxtaposed clauses presented in 2.2.2 below. (1) (“Pencuri” IU 2824–2825) 2824 ingatkan dari rumah, remember-app from house 2825 jangan bawa duit. don’t bring money “Remind me at home not to bring any money.”
This example consists of two clauses in series, one clause in each IU. In IU 2824, the speaker instructs her interlocutors to remind her of something before she leaves home, and then in IU 2825, the speaker specifies what it is that she is to be reminded of: ‘don’t bring any money’. The first IU sets up a frame: it describes a generic event, a nonspecific instance of ‘reminding’. the clause in IU 2825 fills in this frame, specifying exactly what it is the speaker wishes to be reminded of. For this reason, I will use the term framed instantiation to refer to this type of semantic relationship: the first clause sets up a frame, and the material being framed is instantiated by the next clause. By the term instantiation, I mean nothing more than the filling in of a specific frame at a particular, local level of discourse. As I will demonstrate in Section 2.4.2, the framed material is defined by the clause which frames it. A complementation analysis of this example would claim that ingatkan ‘remind’ in IU 2824 takes the clause in IU 2825 as a core argument. The following example is similar, except that in this case both clauses occur in the same IU (IU 358). (2) (“Wisuda” IU 356–358) 356 A: Itu dapet. that.dem get 357 .. Tapi kalau di perusahaan lain, but if at company different
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358
saya takut nggak dapet Jef. 1sg afraid neg get Jef “I’d get it (job benefits). But at a different company, I’m afraid I won’t get any, Jef.”
In the context of this example, A (Agus) and J (Jef) have been discussing job prospects after graduation. This example deals with the relative merits of taking a job with one company over a job with a different company and fewer benefits. IU 358 consists of two clauses. In the first clause saya takut ‘I’m afraid’, Agus indicates a generic state of experiencing fear, and in the next clause he specifies that what he is afraid of is not getting benefits with a job at a different company: nggak dapat ‘I won’t get any’. According to a traditional complementation analysis, takut ‘afraid’ would take the second clause as an object argument. (3) is similar. (3) (“Wisuda” IU 274) Kasihan lho dia cewek. pity prt 3sg girl “It’s too bad that she’s a girl.”
This IU begins with the exclamation kasihan ‘pity’, which is used to express empathy or sadness for another’s misfortune. This expression often occurs as its own IU, or as a reactive token. In this case, however, it is followed by the emphatic particle lho and a predicate nominal clause identifying the specific state of affairs which is pitiable: dia cewek ‘she’s a girl’. The two (male) speakers go on to elaborate that, because of her gender, this person’s parents do not support her educational endeavors, and she is also at a disadvantage in her career. Semantically, there is clearly a relationship between the initial and subsequent juxtaposed clauses in each of these three examples. The initial clause sets up a generic frame or background (reminding, fearing, pitying), and the subsequent clause fills in this frame by presenting a concrete and specific example of the frame’s contents. Often these subsequent clauses are projections (Halliday 1994), but this is not always the case. The framed material, as can be observed in (6) and (7) below, can also refer to an actual event in the world, rather than only to projections — linguistic representations of experiences. I will take up this issue later in 2.4.2. Often the framing clause frames an entire stretch of discourse, not just a single clause. The following three examples are illustrative. Calling these “juxtaposed clauses” is slightly misleading, since in terms of discourse relations at least, there is often a one-to-many relationship. The frame opened in the first
Juxtaposed clauses
clause may be instantiated by many succeeding clauses. In the following example, Jef and Agus are constructing an imaginary scenario, about why one needs to have one’s own car in Jakarta, rather than riding public transportation. They are laughing about the ridiculousness of wearing a suit and tie on the bus, and imagining how hard it would be to arrive at work looking nice under such circumstances. They later go on to joke about making business calls with a cell phone on public transportation. The verb kebayang ‘imagine’ in the first IU frames this as an imaginary event, and the subsequent clauses describe specific events in that imaginary world. (4) (“Wisuda” IU 1564–1570) 1564 Waduh nggak kebayang Jef, gosh neg nonvol-imagine Jef 1565 .. pake jas, wear suit 1566 pake dasi, wear tie 1567 ngejar bis kota lagi. at-chase bus city again 1568 J: @@@@@ 1569 A: Wih kacau kali. ugh messed.up very 1570 @@@ “Gosh, I can’t imagine, Jef: wearing a suit, wearing a tie, and, what’s more, running after the city bus! What a mess!”
The negated verb nggak kebayang ‘not imagine’ in IU 1564 frames the rest of this example as an imaginary event: Agus states that he can’t conceive of the events described in the rest of the example taking place. Thus the first IU frames an entire stretch of discourse, not just a single juxtaposed clause. This is especially true for verbs of speaking, where often the reporting verb introduces a whole stretch of speech as in the following example. (5) (“Pencuri” IU 1539–1550) 1539 Dia bilangnya gini. 3sg say-nya like.this 1540 Keneknya bilang, driver’s.assistant-nya say 1541 .. Mbak. sister
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1542 .. e jangan duduk sini. uh don’t sit here 1543 Duduk sana aja, sit there just 1544 nanti kena angin. later affect wind 1545 .. Tapi aku udah tahu, but 1sg already know 1546 dia, 3sg 1547 maksudnya bukan kena angin. mean-nya neg affect wind 1548 [Tapi], but 1549 I: [Mm]. 1550 L: … awas ada copet. careful ex pickpocket “He said it like this. The conductor said: ‘ma’am, don’t sit here. Sit there instead, or it’ll be too windy.’ But I knew that he didn’t mean it would be too windy, but ‘watch out, there’s a pickpocket.’”
L (Lucy) is describing an instance in which a conductor has warned her of a pickpocket on the bus. Because pickpockets have a reputation for taking revenge on conductors who attempt to thwart their activities, the conductor warns Lucy indirectly: “don’t sit there, it’ll be too windy”. Lucy understands this as a warning of the presence of a pickpocket in that section of the bus. IUs 1539 and 1540 each contain the framing verb bilang ‘say’, and IUs 1341–1344 contain the instantiation of this particular frame — a projection consisting of what the conductor said: a vocative in IU 1541 followed by three clauses. Thus the framing verb bilang ‘say’ frames a whole stretch of discourse, not just a single clause. Similarly, tahu ‘know’ in IU 1545 frames two clauses, IU 1546–1550, which instantiate what it is the speaker knows: “He didn’t mean it was too windy, but ‘watch out, there’s a pickpocket’.” Again, tahu ‘know’ introduces a stretch of discourse, not just a single clause. This is true of verbs of perception, as illustrated in the rather lengthy example (6), where the verb lihat ‘see’ frames a whole series of events that Lucy is describing having witnessed. (6) (“Pencuri” IU 832–853) 832 L: O aku pernah lihat itu lho, oh 1sg ever see that.dem prt
Juxtaposed clauses
833 834 835 836 837 838 839 840 841 842 843 844
845 846 847 848 849 850 851 852
Waktu pertama aku datang ke Yogya ya. time first 1sg come to Yogya prt .. Aku lihat tu pas di= Borobudur Plaza. 1sg see that.dem exact at Borobudur Plaza M: M-hm? L: Itu ada bule kan. that.dem ex westerner prt .. Aku lihat .. dari bis, 1sg see from bus ada bule itu kok lari-lari. ex westerner that.dem how.come run.redup Gitu lho. thus prt Lari-lari tapi tangannya sama gini-gini, run.redup but arm-nya with like.this.redup melambai-lambai itu di depan. wave.redup that.dem at front .. e=, cowok yang naik motor. guy rel ride motorcycle .. Na ternyata cowok yang naik motor tu well apparently guy rel ride motorcycle that.dem ngelariin ini. at-run-app this Ngelariin, at-run-app E: Tas, bag L: [Tasnya]. [bag-nya M: [Tas]. [bag L: La bule itu lari= gitu lho. prt westerner that.dem run thus prt Lari terus, run straight Tapi kan [percuma]. but prt [in.vain M: [Na].
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853
L: Motornya udah .. udah jauh, motorcycle-nya already already far “Oh, once, when I first came to Yogya, I saw this. I saw this at the Borobudur Plaza. There was a westerner, right? I saw this from the bus. There was this westerner, and I was wondering why he was running. He was running, but his arms were like this, waving out in front of him. Um, there was a guy on a motorcycle. It seemed that the guy on the motorcycle had run off with it. Had run off with, (E:) Bag. (L:) his bag. (M:) Bag. (L:) The westerner ran. He kept running, but it was in vain. The motorcycle was already far away.”
This example consists of three framing clauses, all containing the verb lihat ‘see’. All three clauses serve to situate the speaker with reference to the events she is watching. In the first IU, 832, Lucy claims to have seen something, and IU 833 specifies when this took place: “when I first came to Yogya.” IU 834 also contains the framing verb lihat ‘see’ and specifies the location where the observed events took place: at Borobudur Plaza. IU 837 contains the verb lihat ‘see’ as well, and Lucy specifies the vantage point from which she is watching the series of events unfold: from the bus. The remaining IUs in the example consist of instantiating clauses — which specify the exact events Lucy was witnessing: a westerner unsuccessfully trying to chase a guy on a motorcycle who had snatched his bag. This example illustrates the distributed nature of scene construction: Lucy uses three framing clauses, each of which presents a different angle on the “picture”. The framing clauses themselves provide the backdrop for a whole series of clauses and events — they serve as background for an entire stretch of discourse rather than simply an isolated clause. 246 of the 263 occurrences of framed instantiations in the data consist of the generic framing clause preceding the concrete instantiation, as in all of the previous examples. Other examples illustrate the reverse order, consisting of a specific scene/event followed by the framing predicate, as in the following example. (7) (“Dingdong” IU 911) .. mengangkat kepala aja susah, at-lift head just hard “Just lifting my head was tough.”
In this example, the speaker is describing how he felt when he was drunk. The initial clause describes an event — the speaker lifting his head. The subsequent clause — the predicate susah ‘troublesome/hard/difficult’ — is a mental verb which frames this event in terms of the speaker’s attitude and cognitive experi-
Juxtaposed clauses
ence of it. In cases of quotative verbs, often there is a framing clause both before and after the reported speech, as in the following example. (8) “Blewah” IU 190–191 190 Aku bilang gitu. 1sg say thus 191 (H) Semua orang janji palsu aku bilang. all person promise false 1sg say “I said thus: ‘everyone makes false promises’, I said.”
This example consists of three juxtaposed clauses. The first and the last are framing clauses, framing the second clause as a quotation. This is one of many quotative examples where the framing clause comes both before and after the instantiation. (9) provides another example of the instantiation preceding the framing clause, and also provides a transition into the next section, since this example appears to have more than one interclausal relationship, as highlighted by the two possible English translations. (9) (“Wisuda” IU 1649–1651) 1649 .. Pake sepatu juga Gus. wear shoe also Gus 1650 Sepatu diinjak-injak nih, shoe pt-step.on.redup prt 1651 … Disemir juga di rumah nggak ada guna. pt-polish also at house neg ex use (A.) “I was wearing shoes too, Gus. My shoes got all stepped on. It was pointless to have polished them at home.” (B.) “I was wearing shoes too, Gus. My shoes got all stepped on. I had polished them at home, but that was pointless.”
This excerpt is a continuation of the topic sequence from (4), although the interlocutors have now moved from an imagined scenario to a description of something which actually happened to Jef. Jef and Agus are commenting on the difficulties of maintaining spotless, professional attire when riding public transportation in Jakarta. Jef is explaining that all of the time and energy he had invested in looking nice for his recent job interview was useless because he kept getting jostled on the bus. Of interest for the present discussion is IU 1651, which consists of two juxtaposed clauses: disemir juga di rumah ‘(lit.) they had
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been polished at home too’ followed by the second clause nggak ada guna ‘there was no use’. Both can be considered main clauses, and there is no overt signal of a relationship between them. There are at least two possible analyses of the interclausal relations here. Translation (A.) highlights an interpretation of these clauses as forming a framed instantiation: nggak ada guna ‘there is no use’ can be understood as providing a general frame, and the prior clause provides the material being framed. Namely, Jef states that it was useless to have polished his shoes at home. This sequence can also be construed as an adversative (cf. Halliday 1994: 230) as highlighted by translation (B.): “I had polished them at home, but/yet it was of no use”. According to this construal, the state of affairs described in the second clause is true, despite the preventative action taken in the first clause. However, such multifaceted relations are likely only of interest to the analyst, not to the interlocutors. Arguing whether this clause sequence is an instance of a framed instantiation, an adversative, or both is a moot point — there is no grammatical evidence either way, and such a distinction seems irrelevant to the interlocutors, who show no signs of interactional difficulty with this scenario. In this section, I have presented examples of juxtaposed clauses in which one clause serves as a frame for one or more additional clauses which impose specific material into that frame. As I will discuss below in Section 2.5, with respect to morphosyntax, there is no reason to assume that the instantiating clause is in fact grammatically subordinate to, or embedded in, the framing clause, nor that it is a core argument (i.e. complement). These are simply adjacent clauses in the discourse, and the interlocutors infer the relationship between them. There is nothing intrinsic to the morphosyntax of these clauses, or of adjacent clauses in general, to suggest what kind of interclausal relationship exists. As I will demonstrate in the following section, a variety of relations can hold between juxtaposed clauses, without being signaled by grammatical means. It is up to the interlocutors to infer how the clauses are related on a discourse level, if such inference is even warranted, since grammatical cues generally do not make this explicit. 2.2.2 Non-framing juxtaposed clauses Following are several more examples of clauses in series. While these are grammatically and prosodically parallel to those in the previous section, the relationships between the clauses are very different. Clauses in series are associated with a variety of inter-clausal relations, based on semantics and
Juxtaposed clauses
contextual inference, and these relations are not signaled here by grammatical cues. The two clauses in (10) imply a conditional or causal relationship, wherein the state of affairs in the initial clause is the reason or precondition for the occurrence of the state of affairs describe in the subsequent clause. (10) (“Wisuda” IU 1244–1245) 1244 … Nggak ada KTP dibawa, neg ex ID pt-bring 1245 @diangkut. pt-pick.up “you don’t have your ID card with you, you get picked up (by the police).”
This example comes from an exchange between Jef and Agus, in which they are constructing an irrealis scenario. Jef had recently returned from a job interview and qualifications test in Jakarta. He has just commented that the police have been actively stopping people to ask for identification, particularly in the area where he was visiting. Jef and Agus were jointly constructing a scenario in which Jef had forgotten to bring his ID card, was stopped by the police at an ID check, and subsequently arrested because he didn’t have identification. In this scenario, Jef would have missed his interview and tests because he was being held in jail. In IU 1244, Jef introduces the idea of not having brought his ID card, and IU 1245 explains what might have happened to him as a result. These are simply two juxtaposed clauses, with an inferred relationship of causality not signaled by overt connectors; because of the state of affairs described in IU 1244, the result is his being picked up by the police in IU 1245. The following example consists of two clauses in a single IU, suggesting an adversative relationship, similar to one of the possible construals of (9). Here the state of affairs described in the second clause occurs despite the preventative measures taken in the first clause. (11) (“Wisuda” IU 70) J: Dirante iya lenyap. pt-chain yes disappear “It was locked, right, but it disappeared.”
This example consists of two minimal clauses separated by an affirmative particle iya. Jef and Agus have been discussing recent break-ins in their student boardinghouses, including having a bicycle stolen, which is what is being described here. The first clause dirante ‘it was chained’ explains that the bicycle was indeed locked up. The second clause lenyap ‘disappear’ again has no connective
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indicating a relationship with the first clause, but the interlocutors infer an adversative relationship: The bike was locked up, yet it got stolen anyway. This example contrasts with the causality in (10). In (10), the state of affairs described in the first clause causes or brings about the state of affairs in the second. In (11), the state of affairs in the second clause occurs despite the state of affairs described in the first, which was supposed to have prevented the theft. The following example illustrates a concessive relationship, since the state of affairs in the second clause is contrary to expectations in the first. L (Lala) is describing having watched friends drink three martinis and not become drunk. A (Anton) comments that if he were to drink three glasses of something, he himself would be drunk already, although/even if the beverage was only beer. (12) “Dingdong” IU 894) .. gua aja cuman minum bir udah mabuk. 1sg just only drink beer already drunk “Even if I were just drinking beer, I would already be drunk.”
The following three clauses, all in a single IU, are related temporally. The interlocutors are clearing off the lunch table and bringing dishes out to the kitchen. The speaker is commenting on her friend, who had just picked up something (probably a dish), turned around, and put it down right where she had picked it up from. (13) (“Blewah” IU 1202) Lu balik lu ngapain lu taruh sini. 2sg turn.around 2sg at-what-app 2sg put here “You turned around, you did something, and you put it back here!”
Clauses in this example are sequenced with respect to time — a temporal relationship — the order of clauses iconically reflects the order of real-world events. As already illustrated above in example (9), juxtaposed clauses can have multiple interclausal relations simultaneously. (14)–(15) provide two additional examples, as suggested by the two possible English translations for each utterance. (14) (“Pencuri” IU 2840–2842) 2840 [kamu misalnya kamu nggak bawa duit], [2sg example-nya 2sg neg bring money 2841 D: [@@@@] 2842 L: kamu lupa masih bawa kalung to? 2sg forget still bring necklace prt
Juxtaposed clauses
(A.) “So, say you don’t bring any money. You forget and still bring your necklace!” (B.) “So, say you don’t bring any money. You forget that you’ve still got your necklace.”
This excerpt comes from the end of a discussion about thieves at the open-air market who allegedly use various means of “black magic” and hypnosis to steal from passers-by. D (Adit) has expressed a desire to go there, ostensibly to find out if such rumors are really true. She instructs her friends to remind her not to bring any money with her (see example (1) above) so that it won’t disappear. L (Lucy) is constructing an imaginary scenario in which Adit goes to the market, leaves her money at home, but ends up having her necklace stolen because she forgot to leave it at home too. The relevant IU for the present discussion is IU 2842, which consists of two juxtaposed clauses: kamu lupa ‘you forget’ followed by masih bawa kalung ‘(you) still bring (your) necklace’. There is no overt indication of the relationship between these two clauses, which have at least two possible discourse-level relations. Translation (A.) highlights a temporal relationship, parallel to (13) above. As in (13), which has three temporal clauses in a single IU, this example also has multiple clauses per IU — in this case two: the generic act of forgetting, followed by wearing a necklace. Translation (B.) highlights the way in which this utterance also functions as a framed instantiation: lupa ‘forget’ is the frame for the second clause, which provides a specific instantiation of what it was that the speaker had forgotten about. The analyst could argue for either interpretation, or for both operating simultaneously. However, this does not appear to be important for the speakers in the interactional context. In the process of constructing this imagined scenario, the relevant components are the ‘forgetting’ and the ‘bringing of the necklace’. It is up to the interlocutors to infer how these events are related, in light of the imagined scenario, and there appears to be no need to pick only one set of interclausal relations. The following example is also multifaceted — it is both a specific instance of a framed instantiation, and a more general presentation of two members of a list of evaluative details. (15) (“Pencuri” IU 479–480) 479 .. nggak enak gitu lho. neg pleasant thus prt 480 Nggak pegang duit. neg hold money
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(A.) “It’s unpleasant not to have money.” (B.) “It was unpleasant. I didn’t have any money.”
In the context of this example, A (Ari) has been describing an incident where she had her money stolen while on vacation. She is lamenting not being able to do things on vacation such as eating out, since she had no money, but claims that she was fortunate at least in that she was staying with friends and already had her return trip paid for. This excerpt is an evaluation sequence which closes off the description of these events, and a new topic opens immediately afterwards. The example consists of two juxtaposed clauses, one in each IU. Both clauses are syntactically and prosodically complete, but are indeterminate with respect to interclausal relations. Translation (A.) is a framed instantiation, in which nggak enak ‘not pleasant’ in the first clause provides the frame into which the second clause should be imposed: i.e. ‘not having money’ is framed as being ‘unpleasant’. Translation (B.) suggests that these two clauses comprise a list, which is being used as an evaluation sequence to sum up Ari’s narrative of events. The non-integrated prosody seems to support (B.), as IU 480 occurs as an increment, but as I will demonstrate in Section 2.3, it is not uncommon for framed instantiations to have this type of prosody too. Again, multifaceted interclausal relations do not appear to provide difficulty for the interlocutors, as there is a seamless transition to the next topic immediately following IU 480. In sum, the examples in this section demonstrate that clauses in series code a number of different discourse relationships, including causality, adversative, concessive, and temporality, in addition to the framed instantiations illustrated in Section 2.2.1. We have also observed that juxtaposed clauses may have multiple relations. Examples in this and the previous section manifest no grammatical indication of interclausal relations. Temporal clauses, for instance, are encoded no differently than are framed instantiations. For this reason, I suggest that imposing a grammatical distinction of complements versus other juxtaposed clauses in the data is unwarranted. There is no more reason to posit a unique category of “complements” corresponding to framed instantiations than there is to assign a grammatical label to e.g. temporally-sequenced clauses. Recognition of these subtypes of juxtaposed clauses is motivated by pragmatic inference, not morphosyntax, and there is no evidence that framed instantiations form a grammatical subclass distinct from other juxtaposed clauses. In the following sections I will address the prosodic, semantic, and morphosyntactic characteristics of this pragmatic subtype.
Juxtaposed clauses
2.3 Prosody Much recent work has demonstrated the relevance of prosody as reflecting cognition and conceptualization (Chafe 1987, 1994, inter alia; Schuetze-Coburn 1994; Croft 1995). Research by Chafe (1980, 1987, 1994) suggests the IU as a reflection of a single cognitive event. According to such research, material in a single IU is tightly integrated conceptually, while material in separate IUs reflects separate ideas or foci of consciousness. Park (2000) demonstrates a relationship between prosody and the overt occurrence of certain clausal connectives in Korean. Namely, those connectives which indicate closer conceptual linkage between clauses correspond to the occurrence of both clauses in a single IU, while connectives encoding looser integration correlate with clauses distributed in separate IUs. Yet, with the exception of a brief discussion in Ono and Thompson (1995), research documenting the role of prosody in complementation is virtually nonexistent. Prosody is indeed a crucial structural aspect of language, but has tended to be downplayed in favor of morphosyntax. In his (1990) discussion of the four structural indicators languages employ to signal conceptual integration or separation of CTPs and complements, Givón seems to dismiss prosody from being a fruitful area of research: “A fifth component, closely associated with (d) [complementizers] is that of intonational separation of the complement clause from the main clause. That component is probably present in all languages to roughly the same degree, and is thus not itself a matter of typological diversity” (1990: 538). This assertion contains two assumptions which beg for empirical justification and explication: (i.) prosody plays a transparent, iconic role in complementation, and (ii.) all languages utilize prosody equivalently, to encode the same aspects of cognitive structure. Since the current study is focused only on one language, I cannot address the cross-linguistic implications of the second assumption, but it is most certainly an issue which warrants further investigation. The present section will focus on the first claim, and will investigate the role of prosody in framed instantiations in Indonesian. In the corpus, framed instantiations occur with three basic types of prosody: integration within a single IU, distribution across two or more continuing IUs, or the instantiating material may occur as an increment (cf. Ford et al. 2002a, inter alia) — a continuation of an utterance after a point of both prosodic and grammatical completion. Examples (16)–(18) all contain the framing verb tahu ‘know’, and illustrate these three levels of prosodic integration respectively.
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After presenting these examples, I will discuss the ramifications of these three prosodic types for the question of complementation in Indonesian. (16) (“Blewah” IU 310–311) 310 kamu tahu dia mabukan, 2sg know 3sg drunk 311 tapi suka dite- ditengokin maminya. but tend.to trunc pt-visit-app mommy-nya “you knew he’s a drunk, but he kept getting visited by his mommy.”
The context for this example is the speaker’s experience doing required community service (KKN) in a rural village with other university students. The discussion is centering on family members coming to visit, as well as fellow coworkers with whom it is difficult to get along. The particular student they are discussing is known to drink a lot and be a “trouble maker”, but because his mother often would show up unannounced to visit, the student was careful not to engage in these activities for fear of being found out by his mother. In terms of prosody, IU 310 is of interest here. This IU consists of two clauses: the framing clause kamu tahu ‘you know’, and a predicate nominal clause dia mabukan ‘he’s a drunk’. (Note that the second-person pronoun kamu is specific and referential, referring to the addressee who is acquainted with the “drunk”, and is not used as an epistemic discourse marker as the English translation might imply.) These two clauses are produced in a single IU, under one prosodic contour. The following example contains more prosodic separation. (17) (“Pencuri” IU 1347–1348) 1347 D: Nggak soalnya udah tahu, neg problem-nya already know 1348 dia punya duit banyak, 3sg own money much “No, the thing is, they knew she had a lot of money.”
The first IU of this example contains the framing verb tahu ‘know’, followed by the instantiating clause in the second IU. The speaker claims that a wealthylooking woman on the bus had been targeted by pickpockets who knew that she (the wealthy-looking woman on the bus) was carrying a lot of money. Rather than being integrated into a single IU as in the previous example, the framing and instantiating clauses are distributed across two IUs, ostensibly encoding looser conceptual integration (cf. e.g. Croft 1995, Park 2000).
Juxtaposed clauses
The following example is even less integrated, as the juxtaposed clauses form an increment — the instantiating clause occurs after a point of both prosodic and grammatical completion. (18) (“Pencuri” IU 1046–1049) 1046 Tapi aku nggak tahu. but 1sg neg know 1047 Apa mereka, q 3pl 1048 … cuma ngerjain aku cerita kayak gitu, only at-work-app 1sg story like thus 1049 apa memang kejadian beneran, q indeed event truth “But I don’t know. Were they just making fun of me, telling a story like that, or was it really a true event?”
This sequence serves as the coda to a narrative which the speaker has just related, which had actually been told to her by a third party. The speaker is unsure of the truth of the story, and expresses her doubt with the framing clause in IU 1046: tapi aku nggak tahu ‘but I don’t know’. The remainder of the example provides two instantiating clauses, specifying what it is the speaker doesn’t know: ‘Were they just making fun of me by telling a story like that?’ and ‘Was it really a true event?’ This example illustrates a strong degree of separation between the framing clause and the instantiating clauses. The framing clause ends with a final intonation contour, and consists of a grammatically complete clause containing a predicate tahu ‘know’. This is parallel to (15), which also contains an instantiating clause juxtaposed as an increment. Table 1 illustrates the distribution of these three prosodic types for the 263 framed instantiations in the database. To summarize, the examples presented in this section show three types of prosodic integration — 34.22% of framed instantiations in the database occur Table 1.Summary of prosodic types of framed instantiations Integration type
Tokens
Percent of total
Single IU Distributed Increment
90 155 18
34.22% 58.94% 6.84%
Total
263
100%
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as a single IU, 58.94% occur in separate IUs with continuing intonation contour, and 6.84% occur as increments. Now I will turn to a discussion of the implications of these three prosodic types with respect to complementation. 2.3.1 Increments For the 6.84 percent of framed instantiations which occur as increments, the evidence is fairly clear that the instantiating clauses should not be considered core arguments of the framing clause. The main justification for this view is the idea that increments reflect the online planning of an utterance. As discussed by Ford et al. (2002a) and works cited therein, an increment is a continuation of an utterance after a point of both syntactic and prosodic completion. (Because Indonesian does not have specific morphosyntactic cues to differentiate “main” from “subordinate” clauses, my definition of increments is broader than that of Ford et al., who do not include “main clause” increments in their English-based study.) Previous work has shown that increments often coincide with TRPs (Transition Relevance Points), and often indicate interactionally-relevant factors such as a lack of alignment or uptake. In general, the fact that an increment occurs after a point of grammatical and prosodic completion indicates discontinuity in the online planning of an utterance. Since predicates and core arguments are typically conceived of as a single unit, an utterance which displays discontinuity and conceptual separation is not a good candidate for a predicate plus core argument. For the present discussion of a framing verb followed by an increment clause, this discontinuity in online planning suggests that these framed instantiations are not conceptualized as a single unit consisting of a verb followed by required core arguments. Such a conceptualization is incompatible with the view of (18) as a clause with the matrix verb tahu ‘know’ and core arguments (i.e. complements) consisting of the material in the increment. The presence of increments is therefore revealing for an understanding of verb argument structure. The fact that material in increments is not conceptualized as a required core argument strongly suggests that, for those particular framing verbs at least, core arguments are not mandatory or “licensed” obligatorily by the framing verb. In other words, the verb tahu ‘know’ in (18) does not require the presence of the two instantiating clauses. 2.3.2 Single-IU versus distributed prosody While the case against considering increment clauses to be complements is fairly strong, the other two prosodic types are not as definitive. The relationship
Juxtaposed clauses
between prosody and grammar is extremely complex, and not a matter of a simple, one-to-one correlation of prosodic structure to grammatical form. I have already demonstrated several cases of non-framing juxtaposed clauses integrated into a single IU, in which the second clause could in no way be construed as a core argument of the first. (11), (12), and (13) in Section 2.2.2 are examples of non-framing juxtaposed clauses integrated into a single IU — an adversative, a concessive, and a temporal sequence respectively — which are clearly not a clause followed by an argument. All three of the prosodic categories occurring with framed instantiations also occur with other types of juxtaposed clauses. Therefore, the categorical assumption that the production of two clauses under a single intonation contour indicates that one clause is a core argument of the other is not warranted without further justification. Similarly, the converse is also not warranted without further evidence: looser prosodic integration, such as framed instantiations distributed over two or more IUs, does not necessarily indicate non-core arguments. While the different prosodic structures do suggest some sort of a difference in conceptualization, such conceptual differences could indicate a broad range of issues, and are not just limited to core/non-core distinctions. I will pursue sources of morphosyntactic evidence for core argument status in Section 2.5 below, and will concentrate for now on the factors which potentially lead to these two different prosodic types. I have already suggested that framed instantiations presented as increments show that the material was not planned online as a single grammatical or cognitive unit, but what about the remaining two prosodic types? Is there a conceptual difference between framed instantiations produced as a single IU and those distributed over two or more IUs? I do not aim to fully answer this question here, but merely to provide suggestions for further research. I suggest that there is a constellation of factors which, taken together, determine the production of instantiating material either in the same IU as the framing verb, or distributed over two or more IUs. These factors include lexical ‘weight’, information content, and online production difficulties. The presence of both supporting and detracting examples in the data for each of these points suggests that no one factor is responsible on its own, but that several factors interact with each other. One criterion which serves to distinguish these two prosodic types is ‘lexical weight’ — the amount of instantiating material. For those integrated into a single IU, the instantiation tends to be relatively short, while those distributed over two or more IUs contains substantially more material, often consisting of several clauses in a stretch of discourse. For example, (3) above consists of
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single-IU prosody and a short instantiating clause: two words dia cewek ‘she’s a girl’, occurring in the same IU as the framing word kasihan ‘pity’. This contrasts with the situation in (5), an example of distributed prosody accompanying much lexical content: the verb bilang ‘say’ in IU 1540 frames three clauses in IU 1541–1544, consisting of 10 words total. To test the validity of this observation, I conducted counts of the number of words in instantiating material in the database. Because of the frequent occurrence of stretches of discourse in distributed IUs, I assigned a maximum value of 10 words to this category; all instantiating material with more than 10 words was assigned a value of 10. If I had not done this, instantiations consisting of e.g. 50-word stretches of discourse would skew the overall average, making the results meaningless. Because I am using a capped adjusted average for distributed instantiations, the results must not be interpreted as an exact word count, but should instead be used to answer the larger question: do distributed instantiations contain more words than instantiations presented in the same IU as the framing verb? The data answers this question affirmatively: the actual average number of words in the instantiating clause of single-IU examples is 3.6 words, while the capped average for the number of words in the 155 distributed examples is 6.8 (and would have been substantially higher if a constrained average had not been used). Of course this average only reflects overall tendencies — the following two juxtaposed clauses serve as counterexamples. (19) is a single-IU example, which contains 10 words in the instantiating clause after the framing verb pikir ‘think’. This is the longest instantiating clause in a single IU in the database. (20) exhibits distributed prosody, but only contains two words in the instantiating clause yang benar (a headless relative clause, idiomatically glossed as ‘is it the truth?’). (19) (“Pencuri” IU 3337) tak pikir dia itu … es dua apa es tiga gitu lho Dit. 1sg think 3sg that.dem S 2 or S 3 thus prt Dit “I thought she was a graduate student or something, Dit.” (S2 = Masters student; S3 = Ph.D. student; Dit is addressee’s name.) (20) (“Dingdong” IU 1150–1151) 1150 Gua bilang kan, 1sg say prt 1151 .. Yang bener. rel true “I said, is that true?”
Juxtaposed clauses
While the above two utterances present counterexamples to the claim of ‘lexical weight’ influencing the choice of prosody, the overall averages nonetheless support it: single-IU instantiating clauses contain an average of 3.6 words, while those with distributed prosody contain an adjusted average of 6.8 words. These findings likely reflect overall constraints on the amount of information which generally can be presented in a single IU (cf. Chafe 1994). A related factor, suggested by Ono and Thompson (1995) for English complements at least, concerns the amount of new information expressed in the CTP (framing verb). According to Ono and Thompson, “low-content” CTPs, which contribute to the epistemic or evidential stance of the utterance, tend to occur in the same IU as the complement (instantiating clause), while highcontent CTPs, which contribute more to the “point” of the utterance tend to be realized in a separate IU. In the Indonesian data, the vast majority of CTPs which contribute to epistemicity and evidentiality are realized as ‘epistemic -nya constructions’ (see Chapter 5 for an in-depth analysis), yet there are indeed examples of juxtaposed clauses in the data supporting this claim. (1) above, for instance, is an example of distributed prosody co-occurring with high-content verbs in both clauses. The first IU consists of the framing clause ingatkan dari rumah ‘remind me at home’, and the following IU contains the instantiating clause jangan bahwa duit ‘don’t bring money’. Both clauses contain new, relatively high-content information which contribute to the “point” of the utterance. Ingatkan ‘remind’ is an imperative, and serves to do more than simply mark evidentiality or epistemicity: the act of reminding is an important component in the scenario the speakers are constructing to outsmart the thieves. Not bringing money is also central to the scenario, so that the thieves will have nothing to steal. Single-IU prosody with a low-content framing verb is exemplified by (16). In this example, the framing verb in kamu tahu ‘you know’ provides epistemic stance toward the instantiation dia mabukan ‘he’s a drunk’, indicating the addressee’s knowledge of this state of affairs. According to Ono and Thompson, for English at least, such epistemic/evidential marking is often accompanied by prosodic integration into a single IU. But the very next example, (17), serves as a counterexample, since the epistemic verb tahu ‘know’ occurs in a separate IU from the instantiating clause, despite the epistemic/evidential nature and low-content of tahu ‘know’. Many such counterexamples are present in the data, with an epistemic/evidential framing verb often occurring in a separate IU from the instantiating clause. Counterexamples to the converse claim (i.e. instances of high-content
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framing verbs in the same IU as the instantiating clause) are rare in the database. Following is one such example, in which the framing verb seems to do more than just provide epistemicity or stance toward the instantiating clause. (21) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 2354) .. Ternyata bener ada ibu-ibu yang memang sholat di belakang. in.fact true ex mother.redup rel indeed pray at back “In fact, it is true that there are indeed women who pray in the back.”
This example consists of the framing verb benar ‘true’ followed by an instantiating clause — the material the speaker is characterizing as being ‘true’. This is from the radio call-in show about Islam, and the caller has said he has heard this statement, and is wondering if it is in fact true. The “point” of this interaction has to do with the truth or falsehood of this claim; it is the framing verb benar ‘true’ which is doing the bulk of the interactional work here. Thus, this example shows a high-content framing verb in the same IU as the instantiating clause. Yet the overall trend in the database supports Ono and Thompson’s observations of low-content framing verbs, since in most of the single-IU examples the framing verbs are low-content. A third factor leading to single-IU versus distributed prosody has to do with difficulties with on-line planning. In other words, there are examples in the database which seem to suggest that the speaker experienced some sort of production difficulty such as a word-search, and this has led to the utterance being produced as more than one IU. (22) is such an example. (22) (“Muram” IU 1384–1389) 1384 … Misalnya, example-nya 1385 … yang pernah, rel ever 1386 pernah saya tahu itu di, ever 1sg know that.dem at 1387 … Beringharjo itu pernah ada, Beringharjo that.dem ever ex 1388 … orang .. bakul-bakul yang itu lho. person basket.redup rel that.dem prt 1389 Berjualan di itu lho. mid-merchandize at that.dem prt “For instance, once, I know once at, the Beringharjo market once there were, people … peddlers like. Selling stuff, like.”
Juxtaposed clauses
This example is marked by a number of short pauses, repetitions of the word pernah ‘once/ever’, and frequent usage of the phrase itu lho, which sometimes functions as a marker of hesitation, and there is even an IU break within a prepositional phrase — between IU 1386–1387 di Beringharjo itu ‘at the Beringharjo market’. The speaker seems to be having trouble formulating what it is that he wants to express. The framing verb tahu ‘know’ occurs in IU 1386, but it takes several IUs before the speaker is able to express what it is that he ‘knows’: ‘once there were peddlers selling stuff at the Beringharjo Market’. Given less disfluency and lexical search, perhaps this clause could have been formulated in the same IU as the epistemic framing verb tahu ‘know’. Thus it appears that online planning has some influence over distributed versus singleIU prosody. The following is a counterexample — containing a disfluency, but uttered as a single IU. (23) (“Muram” IU 253) .. saya merasa agak .. agak lancang, 1sg at-feel somewhat somewhat out.of.place “I felt I had overstepped my bounds.”
This example contains two signs of disfluency: a pause and lexical repetition of agak ‘somewhat’. But unlike the previous example, it occurs as a single IU. To summarize, in this section I suggest three possible reasons why a framed instantiation may occur either as a single IU, or be distributed across two or more IUs: the amount of lexical material in the instantiation, low versus high content of the framing verb, and difficulty in planning/production. The presence of counterexamples for each claim indicates that no single factor is responsible on its own, but rather suggests an interaction among these factors, as well as possible additional constraints not yet discovered. A fruitful area for future research would be a correlational study of the relative ranking of each of these constraints, as well as a search for other distributional correlates of these two prosodic types. Prosody is only one of the structural factors in framed instantiations. Now I will turn to a discussion of the semantics and morphosyntax of these constructions.
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2.4 Semantics In Section 2.2.1, I presented examples of juxtaposed clauses which I labeled framed instantiations. I characterized these examples as consisting of a generic clause setting up a frame, and another clause or stretch of discourse illustrating that frame and filling it in with specific material. In this section I will seek to further characterize the semantics of these constructions. I will demonstrate that framed instantiations in the Indonesian data encode the same types of meanings which cross-linguistic literature on complementation suggests are generally encoded by grammatical complements. 2.4.1 The framing clause The notion of a clause setting up a frame within which additional clauses or stretches of discourse are to be viewed is hardly new, and is in keeping with discussions of the semantics of complementation. This terminology resonates especially well with Langacker’s insights into the role of the CTP in grounding: I suggest that one should take quite seriously the notion of the ground being — in some real sense — the vantage point from which a linguistically coded scene is viewed. In particular, the circumstances of the speech event, together with the nature of the grounding relationship, can be thought of as defining a kind of viewing frame representing what is immediately accessible for focused observation. As the locus of viewing attention, this frame constitutes the onstage region (or immediate scope of predication) for the grounded structure. (Langacker 1991: 441)
Thus the framing verbs serve a grounding function — they contribute a particular angle or background to the framed material. Perhaps the most tangible example of this presented so far occurs above in (6), in which the speaker (Lucy) is describing witnessing a westerner chasing a guy on a motorcycle who had stolen his bag. In this example there are three framing clauses, each containing the verb lihat ‘see’ and each providing a unique bit of background to the events: IU 832–833 grounds the events in a specific time period, IU 834 provides the location, and IU 837 gives the vantage-point of the speaker. All three of these framing clauses serve to ground the witnessed event in terms of the perceptions of the speaker. In more abstract examples, this grounding can provide evidentiality (means of knowledge), or stance (mental attitude of the speaker). For instance, in (2) above (Saya takut nggak dapet ‘I’m afraid I won’t get any (job benefits)’), the framing verb takut ‘fear’ grounds the rest of the
Juxtaposed clauses
utterance in the emotional attitude of the speaker. I would like to suggest that this aspect of grounding is an essential component for all of the framing clauses in the data. Typical framing verbs from the database include: verbs of speaking (bilang ‘say’, tanya ‘ask’, kata ‘word/say’, doa ‘pray’, bisik ‘whisper’); verbs of cognition (tahu ‘know’, pikir ‘think’, rasa ‘feel’, ingat ‘remember’, kira ‘guess/ reckon’, lupa ‘forget’, and bayang ‘imagine’); verbs of perception (lihat ‘see’, dengar ‘hear’); and verbs expressing epistemicity or stance toward a proposition (arti ‘mean/signify’, jelas ‘clear’, kasihan ‘pity’, lucu ‘funny’, susah ‘hard/ difficult’, takut ‘fear’, and benar ‘true’). As exemplified by this list, the framing predicates in the data are representative of the class of verbs which Givón (1980, 1990, 2001a) calls perception-cognitionutterance verbs. This class of verbs is on the lower end of Givón’s binding hierarchy, suggesting less syntactic integration between CTP and complement clause. This parallels the situation of frame instantiations in the Indonesian data, as the framing clause and framed material occur as separate clauses. The framing verbs in the data also seem similar to the verbs which Dixon (1991, 1995) refers to as “Primary-B” verbs. Roughly characterized, Primary-B verbs are verbs whose object can be either an NP or another predicate. Whether the framed material in the data can be considered a grammatical object of a verb is an issue to which I will return in 2.5. In sum, this section has demonstrated the semantic parallels between framing clauses in the data, and general research on CTPs cross-linguistically. Based on semantics alone, Indonesian framing clauses appear to be CTPs. I will return to this issue after discussing the characteristics of the framed material. 2.4.2 The framed material As suggested in the previous section, a good deal of work has been done to characterize the CTPs of complement constructions, and we observe definite semantic parallels between what other researchers traditionally call CTPs and what I refer to as framing clauses in the Indonesian data. A semantic characterization of the framed material — what I am referring to as the instantiation — is not so straightforward, however, nor have there been many attempts to characterize the semantics of complement clauses themselves. The main problem with attempting to characterize the semantics of the framed material is that these instantiating clauses do not comprise a distinct category, and they are not different from any other clause in a stretch of discourse. What unifies them as instantiating clauses is the mere fact that they are framed by
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another clause. There is nothing particularly unique about them otherwise. One useful way to describe some of the instances of framed material is in terms of Halliday’s (1994) notion of projection. A projection is defined as: “the logical-semantic relationship whereby a clause comes to function not as a direct representation of (nonlinguistic) experience but as a representation of a (linguistic) representation” (Halliday 1994: 250). In other words, a projection is a reformulation of an experience coded in language, and Halliday identifies three types: “reports”, “ideas”, and “facts”. “Reports” correspond to verbal representation of speech in a discourse. Examples (5) and (8) are projections of this type, as the verb bilang ‘say’ introduces a stretch of reported speech. “Ideas” are characterized as mental/cognitive events being talked about using language. (4) is such a projection, since the predicate nggak kebayang ‘not imagine’ introduces several ideas of events in an irrealis scenario. “Facts” are defined as impersonal projections which come prepackaged in language and are not directly reported or thought by a specific agent. Perhaps the clearest example of this so far is (21), where the clause ada ibu-ibu yang memang sholat di belakang ‘there are women who indeed pray in the back’ is seen as a linguistic entity, the truth of which is being asserted by the framing verb benar ‘true’. But many examples of framed material in the data do not function as projections, since they refer to actual real-world events rather than simply reports or ideas of events. These include, among other examples, (7), in which the speaker characterizes as susah ‘difficult’ the act of lifting his head when he was drunk, and (9), where the speaker frames the actual event of having polished his shoes as nggak ada guna ‘it was useless’. While many examples can be characterized as projections, this is by no means exhaustive, and the non-projection examples appear to have no specific unifying features. As this shows, virtually any type of semantic material can be framed, so in this respect there is nothing particularly remarkable or noteworthy about the framed material on its own merit. Similarly, approaches to characterizing the semantic nature of complement clauses tend to shy away from defining them intrinsically, but instead tend to characterize them in terms of their relationship to the CTP: (i.) complements are conceptually subordinate (e.g. Langacker 1991, 1999), and (ii.) without the complement a sentence would be “incomplete” (e.g. Sneddon 1996). I will attempt to address both of these issues here. As discussed in Section 1.3 of the previous chapter, Langacker characterizes complement clauses as “conceptually subordinate” to the CTP: By the very nature of a complement clause, the process it describes undergoes a kind of conceptual subordination: rather than being viewed in its own terms
Juxtaposed clauses
as an independent object of thought, it is primarily considered for the role it plays within the superordinate relationship expressed by the main clause. Viewing the subordinate process as a main-clause participant implies a conceptual distancing whereby this process is construed holistically and manipulated as a unitary entity. (Langacker 1991: 441)
This approach is in keeping with one of the key tenets of cognitive grammar, the relatively direct mapping of conceptual structure onto grammatical form. Namely, because complement clauses are grammatically “subordinate” to their CTPs (whatever that means), therefore they also must be conceptually subordinate. There are at least two drawbacks to this approach. First, assuming this assertion is correct (that grammatical subordination indicates conceptual subordination), for colloquial Indonesian at least, it is at best irrelevant, since there is no overt indication of grammatical subordination in the first place. Therefore it is not appropriate to assume that the instantiating material is somehow conceptually subordinate to the framing clause in framed instantiations in the data. Secondly, other research (Ono and Thompson 1995, Thompson 2002) casts doubt on the claim that complements are conceptually subordinated to their CTPs at all. Such research suggests that in conversational language, the complement clause tends to both provide new information as well as be the locus of the primary action which the speakers wish to accomplish with their talk. Langacker notices this as well (1999: 161, 170). In a discussion of discontinuous constituency and the invented sentence “Your wallet, I think, was on the desk”, Langacker observes: Less often discussed is the type of arrangement observed in (8)b [“Your wallet, I think, was on the desk”], where one clause — your wallet was on the desk — occupies foreground in the sense of providing the main content the speaker wishes to convey, while the other clause — I think — remains in the background as a secondary qualification. (Langacker 1999: 161)
This analysis fits well with Thompson and Mulac’s (1991b) discussion of “epistemic parentheticals” rather than complementation, the relevance of which Langacker does not acknowledge. Instead of claiming that the CTP “provides the ‘lens’ through which the complement is viewed” (Langacker 1999: 243), I suggest that Langacker is right in his claim that the CTP “remains in the background as a secondary qualification”. It merely provides a frame or grounding, contributing to the overall epistemic or evidential background of the complement clause. I will return to this idea in Chapter 5 on epistemic -nya constructions, which have the same semantic characteristics as traditional CTPs
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but function formally as adverbials within a clause. Another way in which complement clauses have been characterized is exemplified in the approach taken by Sneddon (1996) and other writers of traditional, formal Indonesian grammars. (See Section 1.4.1 for further discussion.) Sneddon’s approach is to claim that a sentence would be incomplete without the complement clause. “A complement is almost always obligatory to the construction in which it occurs. Thus Ibu mulai ‘Mother began’ is incomplete because it does not state what mother began doing. The verb mulai requires a verbal complement: Ibu mulai berbicara ‘Mother began to speak’” (Sneddon 1996: 265). This may be true for decontextualized sentences, but the notion of semantic incompleteness is not defensible for language viewed in its discourse and social context. In language-in-use, the “completeness” of a sentence has more to do with its relevance to the ongoing interaction than to syntactic or semantic requirements. For instance, the corpus contains 14 tokens of the verb mulai ‘begin’, the verb which Sneddon uses in his example. Only three of these actually occur with a “verbal complement”, as exemplified in (24). (This is an example of the “verbs in series” type of complement which I will address in Chapter 4.) (24) (“Wisuda” IU 966) .. Kapan ni mulai ngepak Gus. when this begin at-pack Gus “When will you start packing, Gus?”
Three more of the fourteen tokens of mulai ‘begin’ are followed by an NP, as in (25). (25) (“Wisuda” IU 152) Dia jam sdelapan baru mulai tes. 3sg hour trunc eight just begin test “He just started the test at eight o’clock.”
The remaining eight of the fourteen tokens of mulai ‘begin’ precede neither a “verbal complement” nor an NP, as in (26). This excerpt comes from a discussion about places to eat on campus. D (Adit) has just said there is a canteen near the Literature department which she thinks is especially delicious, and L (Lucy) is asking her about it. (26) (“Pencuri” IU 3826–3830) 3826 L: Sekarang di mana sih kantinnya emang? now at where prt canteen-nya indeed
Juxtaposed clauses
3827 D: Pindah belakang. move back 3828 Tapi belum [mulai kayaknya]. but not.yet [begin like-nya 3829 A: [Belum mulai]. [not.yet begin 3830 L: Lho kok emang kamu udah bilang o enak? prt how.come indeed 2sg already say oh delicious “(L:) Where’s the canteen now? (D:) It moved to the back side of the building. But it hasn’t started yet it seems. (A:) It hasn’t started yet. (L:) Well then how come you said ‘oh, it’s delicious!’?”
There are two tokens of mulai ‘begin’ in this example, one in IU 3828 and the other in IU 3829. Both occur clause-finally, but I cannot justify the claim that these utterances are somehow more “incomplete” than those in (24) or (25). Based on the eight such examples in the database, it seems that Sneddon’s notion that mulai ‘begin’ “requires a verbal complement” should be re-examined. It does not appear to “require” anything, either in a semantic or syntactic sense. What makes an utterance complete or incomplete is its relevance to the social and discourse context. Thus to characterize complement clauses as something without which a sentence would be “incomplete” is neither a useful definition nor an accurate reflection of the data. In Sneddon’s defense, however, his definition of complement is different from the one assumed in the present study, and the variety of Indonesian he is describing is formal written language, not the colloquial spoken variety found in the database. But my point remains that semantic “incompleteness” is not a useful way of describing the situation of framed instantiations in the spoken corpus. In sum, the framed clauses in framed instantiations in the data do not fall into a unique semantic class, but get their status as members of this category by virtue of being framed by another clause. The traditional semantic characterizations of complements do not help define the framed material either, since these characterizations (such as “complements are conceptually subordinate to CTPs”, or “a sentence is not complete without its complement”) are, at best, problematic. 2.5 Morphosyntax In the previous section I have suggested that framed instantiations in the data illustrate the same type of semantic characteristics commonly associated with
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complementation. This is primarily based on the semantic classes which framing verbs fall into, and their function to frame another clause or stretch of discourse. But as defined in Chapter 1, complementation refers to a grammatical process of a predicate taking another clause as a syntactic argument: “By complementation we mean the syntactic situation that arises when a notional sentence or predication is an argument of a predicate” (Noonan 1985: 42). Similarly, Givón states: “Defined in the broadest semantic terms, verbal complements (V-Comp) are clauses that function as subject or object arguments of other clauses” (Givón 2001b: 39). But “subject” or “object” are grammatical, not semantic, categories, and in order to claim the existence of complementation in a given language, this claim should be based on grammatical (i.e. morphosyntactic), not semantic, evidence. To return to my analogy based on morphological tense, introduced in Chapter 1: even though a language like Indonesian has the semantic resources to talk about past events (by using time adverbials, aspectual particles, and general contextual cues), one cannot claim that Indonesian possesses “past tense” as a grammatical category, since it is not indicated morphosyntactically. Similarly, the purpose of the present section is to address sources of morphosyntactic evidence for a grammatical category of complementation in Indonesian, specifically in juxtaposed clauses that function semantically as framed instantiations. What makes this particularly challenging for the colloquial Indonesian data, and for Indonesian in general, is the lack of overt morphosyntactic cues typically associated with complementation. Indonesian does not have case, does not mark verbs as finite or nonfinite, and has no other overt indicators of grammatical subordination. For the 263 examples of framed instantiations in the data, there is also no hint of anything resembling a complementizer, which is an issue I will return to in Chapter 3. Given the overall paucity of overt morphosyntactic cues for complementation in the colloquial Indonesian data, I will pursue other potential sources of grammatical evidence which may be brought to bear on the question of whether instantiating clauses are arguments of their framing verbs. The areas to which I will devote the remainder of this section are: constituent order, voice/diathesis prefixes, and applicative suffixes. 2.5.1 Constituent order As discussed above in 2.2.1, the majority of framed instantiations in the database occur with a framing verb followed by the framed clause. Of the 263
Juxtaposed clauses
examples, 246 occur in this order, while only 17 occur as framed material followed by framing verb. Relevant for the present discussion is the question: does constituent order provide any source of evidence for or against claiming that framed material is a core argument of the framing verb? The answer appears to be no. Cumming and Englebretson (1998) have described trends for constituent order in colloquial Indonesian conversational data. When an A-argument is present, constituent order tends to be fairly rigid: A-V-P order for agent-trigger clauses, and P-V-A order for patient-trigger. However, when no A-argument is present, constituent order is relatively free, although in patient-trigger clauses it tends to still be P-V. As argued by Cumming and Englebretson, the frequent lack of overt A-arguments and/or verb morphology leads to a good deal of indeterminacy regarding the trigger-status of each argument, and the grammatical voice of the verb. The relevant data which would shed light on the question of the argument status of framed clauses would be twofold. First, for framing-verbs marked with Agent-Trigger morphology, we would expect to always find the non-agent arguments occurring after the verb. Therefore, if we found instances in the data of an agent-trigger-marked framing-verb with an overt agent, preceded by the framed material, this would suggest that the framed material is not an argument. However, there are no such examples in the database. For all of the instances of the framed material before the framing verb, either the framing verb has no overt agent, or no overt agent-trigger morphology. Thus, pre-verbal framed clauses provide no means of either justifying or disputing grammatical complementation. Secondly, based on Cumming and Englebretson’s observations, for PatientTrigger framing clauses with an overt A-argument, we would expect to find the P-argument occurring before the verb. Therefore, if we were to find a patienttrigger framing-verb with an overt agent, followed by the framed material, this would suggest that the framed material is not an argument. There are only 8 framing verbs in the database marked with overt patient-trigger morphology. 7 have no overt A-argument, and are therefore irrelevant to the question at hand, since constituent order in clauses with no overt A is relatively free. The one example which does have an overt agent (marked as an oblique) is a ditransitive verb. The recipient is clear from context and not expressed overtly, and the theme-argument is the framed clause.
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(27) (“Pencuri” IU 1033–1034) 1033 Kok bisa ditawarin sama= Yani, how.come can pt-offer-app by Yani 1034 suruh tidur sana? order sleep there “How come Yani offered to let them sleep there?” (Lit. “how can it be (they) were offered by Yani: told to sleep there.”)
This excerpt comes from the middle of a narrative about the interlocutors’ mutual friend Yani, who allegedly had things stolen from her house after allowing two strangers to spend the night there. In this utterance, the speaker is expressing amazement that Yani would have done such a thing. The framing verb tawar ‘bargain/offer’ occurs in IU 1033, marked both with the patienttrigger prefix di- and the colloquial applicative suffix -in. As discussed below in 2.5.2.2.1, this suffix is flexible, indexing either the recipient or theme in ditransitive verbs, and allowing them to be “promoted” to trigger. In this case, the semantic theme-argument is the framed material — the clause in IU 1034. The semantic recipient-argument is unexpressed, but in context clearly refers to mereka ‘they (the two strangers who spent the night and allegedly stole Yani’s things)’. If the recipient had been expressed, it would go pre-verbally, as in the following sentence elicited from my consultants. (28) (Elicited) Kok bisa mereka ditawarin sama Yani, suruh tidur sana? how.come can 3pl pt-offer-app by Yani order sleep there “How come Yani offered to let them sleep there?”
If we assume that P-V-A order is the norm for di-prefixed verbs with overt A-arguments (as suggested by Cumming and Englebretson), then the trigger in (27) is the unexpressed 3pl recipient, not the semantic theme in IU 1034. But, technically, either argument could become trigger, and thus this one example is indeterminate. The remaining 7 examples with overt Patient-Trigger morphology are simply irrelevant, as are the instances of framing verbs with no overt agent, and/or with no overt trigger morphology. Their constituent orders tell us nothing about verbal arguments, due to the fact that constituent order in such clauses is fairly free anyway. The other types of framed instantiations, in which the framing verb occurs after the instantiating clause, look like prototypical subject complements. These include examples like (7) and (9) above. In (7), the framing verb susah ‘tough/
Juxtaposed clauses
difficult’ is preceded by the clause mengangkat kepala aja ‘(I) only lifted (my) head’. In (9), the framing clause nggak ada guna ‘it was no use’ is preceded by disemir di rumah ‘(I) polished (them) at home’. In both instances, the framing verb is intransitive, taking only an S-argument. Because Indonesian verbs which take only S-arguments do not index these arguments at all, it is not possible to tell whether these specific examples as they actually appear in the data are instances of an instantiating clause as a grammatical S-argument, or whether they are two juxtaposed clauses. The question of “subject complementation” for S-arguments of intransitive verbs is unanswerable for these examples, because Indonesian verb morphology does not overtly index S-arguments. In sum, constituent order in framed instantiations is silent as to the question of whether the framed clauses are in fact arguments or not. The primary reason for this is that most framing verbs either lack overt voice morphology and/or lack an expressed A-argument. In clauses lacking either of these elements, constituent order is fairly free. In clauses which do have overt voice morphology and A-arguments, the framed material always comes after the framing verb. In general, I would suggest that this strong bias is more likely due to constraints on “heavy” constituents, as discussed by Dryer (1980), rather than any clear indication of argument structure. According to Dryer’s crosslinguistic observations, larger linguistic units (such as clauses or longer NPs) tend to come after lighter material. Thus a framed clause would tend to come after a framing verb. Constituent order seems irrelevant to the question at hand, and therefore I will turn to the role of verb morphology itself. 2.5.2 Verb morphology In order to meet the grammatical definition of complementation cited above from both Noonan and Givón, one would need to demonstrate that a clause is functioning as the subject or object of another predicate. One challenge posed by Indonesian is the issue of what counts as a “subject” or “object”. As outlined in 1.2.3.5.1 of the sketch grammar, the trigger (or “subject”) of a clause is sometimes indicated by verbal prefixes: the meN- or N- prefix when the semantic A-argument is trigger, and di- when the semantic P-argument is trigger. The status of S-arguments of intransitive predicates, and arguments of verbs with no voice prefixes, is indeterminate (cf. Cumming and Englebretson 1998), and is one of the catalysts for the typological debate over whether Indonesian is essentially a “nominative-accusative” or an “ergative-absolutive” language (cf. Cumming and Wouk 1987). In general, only the trigger argument
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can be “relativized” for relative clauses or “extracted” for cleft questions, while non-trigger arguments cannot.1 Evidence for a grammatical category of object is much less compelling, and there does not seem to be much of a grammatical distinction among the various types of non-trigger arguments. Evidence for an object category comes primarily from the ability of some non-trigger arguments to be indexed by the valence-increasing suffixes -i, -kan, and -in (cf. 1.2.3.5.2 of the grammar sketch), and the ability of some non-trigger arguments to be “promoted” to trigger by means of voice-prefix alternations. See Kaswanti Purwo (1997) for a discussion of the distinguishing features for a variety of Indonesian NP objects. 2.5.2.1Verbs with no patient-trigger form There exists a host of non-trigger arguments in the data which do not meet the criteria for “object”. They do not co-occur with applicative verbal suffixes, and they cannot be “promoted” to trigger because the predicate verb has no corresponding patient-trigger form. As discussed in 1.4.1, these non-trigger arguments are what some grammars of Indonesian traditionally have called “complements”, which I will refer to as complement2. According to Sneddon: “A complement is a clause component which resembles an object but which cannot become the subject of a passive clause” (Sneddon 1996: 265). These can be NPs, predicates, or clauses, and have the semantic characteristics of objects, but lack the grammatical signals of objecthood — they are not indexed by an applicative suffix and cannot be “promoted” to trigger. Thus, following the grammatical definition of complementation given by Noonan and Givón, these Indonesian complement2 clauses are not complements, because they are neither the subject nor object of a predicate. Sneddon catalogs numerous verbs which take a complement2 but not an object. These include most of the cognitionutterance verbs in framing-clauses in the data: most verbs of speaking and reporting, and many verbs of cognition and emotion. For example, Sneddon’s (1996: 268) list of “intransitive report verbs” which take complement2s but not objects include: tahu ‘know’, berkata ‘say’, percaya ‘believe’, sadar ‘be aware’, ingat ‘remember’, berpendapat ‘have the opinion’, berpikir ‘think’, lupa ‘forget’,
1. Although I will use terms in this section such as “relativization”, “extraction”, “promotion”, and “passivization”, I am using them only as conventionalized and convenient labels. I do not endorse the processual metaphors they imply about grammar or the underlying assumptions of movement or transformation from Deep Structure, and will therefore put such terms in quotation marks.
Juxtaposed clauses
beranggapan ‘have the opinion consider’, yakin ‘be sure’, and berharap ‘hope’. Most of these verbs appear as framing verbs in the data, suggesting that their instantiating clauses are in fact not objects, and therefore not complements. The claim that some Indonesian verbs have no patient-trigger form raises an interesting methodological issue. In a corpus-based study of grammar, how is it possible to ascertain that a particular form cannot occur? As an example, consider the verb tahu ‘know’. This is the second-most frequent verb in the database (the most frequent being the existential verb ada), with 130 tokens of this stem in the 6 speech events. Sometimes this verb precedes an NP as in (29) below, and it also frames clauses as in several previous examples (e.g. (16)–(18)), or occurs with no material after it at all (e.g. (34) below). This is one of the “intransitive report verbs” Sneddon lists as not having a patient-trigger form. And indeed the form *ditahu is not attested in the corpus. Yet the lack of occurrence in the database does not necessarily mean that it never occurs — perhaps it does occur elsewhere, but just happens to not show up in these six speech events. To address this issue, many linguists turn to the intuitions of native speakers, constructing sentences with the unattested form, and asking consultants whether this form is even possible. The following is an occurrence of tahu ‘know’ followed by an NP, which occurs in the data, and which I used as a model sentence for elicitation purposes. (29) (“Dingdong” IU 295) L: … A itu gua udah tahu jurusnya, ah that.dem 1sg already know strategy-nya “Oh, I already know the strategy for that one.”
This example is an excerpt from an ongoing discussion of video games at the mall. L (Lala) is talking about a particular game, and claims to know a certain strategy for winning it. The verb tahu ‘know’ co-occurs with the NP jurus ‘steps/ moves/strategy’. Tahu ‘know’ is one of the verbs Sneddon lists as “intransitive report verbs”, which can only take a complement2, not an object. The rationale for this claim is that tahu ‘know’ has no patient-trigger form — it is not possible to affix this verb with di-. The verb form *ditahu is unattested in the data, and my consultants are unequivocal in their rejection of it, as demonstrated by the following elicited pair of sentences. Both consultants accepted the form in (A.), and rejected (B.) as completely “wrong”. Note that I have elicited this example using the full NP semua anak-anak ‘all the children’ since, as discussed in 1.2.3.5.1, patient-trigger verbs with pronominal agents do not take the di-
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prefix, and are often therefore indeterminate as to whether the agent- or patient-trigger form is being used. (30) (Elicited) (A.) Semua anak-anak tahu jurusnya. all child.redup know strategy-nya “All the children know the strategy.” *(B.) Jurusnya ditahu oleh semua anak-anak. strategy-nya pt-know by all child.redup
While the sentence in (30)A. is fully acceptable with semua anak-anak ‘all the children’ as trigger, the NP jurus ‘steps/moves/strategy’ cannot be “promoted” to trigger in (30)B., since the verb tahu ‘know’ has no patient-trigger form. Writers of traditional Indonesian grammar would claim that this NP is a complement2 rather than an object. Both consultants were adamant that the form *ditahu cannot occur. In order to produce a sentence with a similar meaning having jurus ‘strategy’ as the trigger, an Indonesian speaker would choose the verb form diketahui, as in the following elicited example. (31) (Elicited) Jurusnya diketahui oleh semua anak-anak. strategy-nya pt-nonvol-know-app by all child.redup “The strategy is understood by all the children.”
The agent-trigger form of this sentence would be: (32) (Elicited) Semua anak-anak mengetahui jurusnya. all child.redup at-nonvol-know-app strategy-nya “All the children understand the strategy.”
But this is not the sentence which the speakers produced in (30)A., since the verb form mengetahui is used instead of the form tahu. The dictionary entry for this verb (Echols and Shadily 1989) differentiates them as follows: tahu “know/be cognizant of”, versus mengetahui “know/understand something”. And there is no question as to the grammatical status of the NP jurusnya ‘strategy’; it is an object not a complement2 since it is overtly marked here with the applicative suffix -i. There is one example of this form in the database, presented in (33) below. (33) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 817–819) 817 T: Tetapi, but
Juxtaposed clauses
818
… mencoba berkata, at-try mid-word 819 tentang hal yang saya ketahui, about thing rel 1sg at-nonvol-know-app “But I try to talk about things I understand.”
In this example, the NP hal ‘thing’ is the trigger of the verb, and the relativized NP of a relative clause. Note that the patient-trigger prefix di- does not occur, since the A-argument is a personal pronoun; but since (formally) only triggers can be relativized, this is clearly a patient-trigger clause. While the object status of the non-trigger argument of mengetahui is not in doubt, the point remains that this is not the verb which the speakers actually produced in the data; it remains impossible to justify the non-trigger argument of tahu ‘know’ in (29) as an object, since non-trigger arguments of tahu cannot be “promoted” without the addition of the verbal suffix -i and the prefix ke-. Sneddon’s point remains that tahu ‘know’ is an “intransitive report verb”, and there is simply no morphosyntactic means of justifying an NP as an object argument. This is also true for the 23 instances in the database where tahu ‘know’ occurs as a framing verb in framed instantiations, such as examples (16)–(18) in Section 2.3. As with the NPs discussed above, it is not possible to justify these framed clauses as object arguments of the verb tahu ‘know’ either: they are not indexed by an applicative suffix, and they cannot be “promoted” to trigger. In terms of frequency and argument structure, it is interesting to note that the majority of tokens of tahu ‘know’ in the database occur with neither NPs nor clauses. Of the 130 tokens of this stem in the database, only 23 occur as framing verbs of instantiating clauses, 32 occur with a non-trigger NP, and 62 occur alone. (The remaining 13 tokens occur as fixed adverbials such as setahu saya ‘as far as I know’, or in fixed expressions such as tahu-tahu ‘unexpectedly’.) Following is an example of tahu ‘know’ followed by neither an NP nor a clause. (34) “Pencuri” IU 910–916 910 I: Ya mungkin karena kita konsentrasi ke omongannya, yes maybe because 1pl concentrate to talk-nya 911 dia beraksi. 3sg mid-action 912 M: O-o. aff 913 O-o. aff
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914
Ya kita nggak tahu. yes 1pl neg know 915 L: Gimana? how 916 E: Punya kakakku lain. possess sibling-1sg different “(I:) Yeah, maybe because you’re concentrating on the conversation, s/he takes action. (M:) Mhm. Mhm. Yeah, you don’t know. (L:) What happened? (E:) My sister had a different experience.”
This excerpt comes from a discussion of ways that pickpockets on the bus are known to distract passengers in order to rob them. Speaker I (Indra) is claiming that sometimes pickpockets strike up a friendly conversation, but the purpose of the conversation is to make the passengers concentrate on something other than their possessions, and thus be unaware that they are being robbed. In IUs 912–913 M (Mega) signals affiliation by means of two affirmative backchannels, and then offers a summary in IU 914: ya kita nggak tahu ‘yeah, you don’t know’. (Note that the Indonesian first-person inclusive pronoun kita is often used as the generic ‘one/you’.) There is no mention of what it is that is not known: perhaps she means ‘you don’t know what people might do’ or ‘you don’t know you’re being robbed’, but this potential ambiguity seems not to bother the interlocutors: IU 915 consists of L’s (Lucy’s) prompting E (Ersi) to continue a story she had started before the digression of pickpockets’ use of distraction, and Ersi introduces her narrative in IU 916. For the present discussion, note that tahu ‘know’ in IU 914 has no non-agent argument — neither NP nor clausal — and occurs turn-finally. Such is the case of the majority of occurrences of this verb in the data. For now, I will leave this as a noteworthy feature of this verb: it has fixed voice (i.e. cannot occur with a patient-trigger prefix), and the majority of tokens in the database co-occur with nothing that can be construed as a semantic P-argument (either NP or clausal). In sum, for the many Indonesian verbs like tahu ‘know’ which have no patient-trigger form, the grammatical evidence does not support considering the subsequent clause as an object argument. Based on negative evidence — the inability of “intransitive report verbs” like tahu ‘know’ to alternate between agent- and patient-trigger forms — the non-trigger arguments of these verbs cannot be considered objects. Juxtaposed clauses then, which contain these types of framing verbs, do not meet the grammatical definition of complements. These “nonpassivizable” framing verbs comprise well over half of the framed instantiations in the database, suggesting that a majority of the data
Juxtaposed clauses
cannot be considered grammatical complementation. The empirical basis for this claim has come primarily from negative evidence: speakers claim that certain verbs have no patient-trigger form, and the forms are not attested in the corpus. However, an approach based on these type of intuitive speaker judgments can be problematic. In 1.2.2, I have already discussed some disadvantages of using elicitation to research grammar in actual language-in-use, especially when the language variety is considered colloquial and nonstandard by most speakers, as in the present study. This particular drawback becomes especially evident with reference to verbs which are prescriptively not supposed to have patient-trigger forms. Specifically, how does the researcher know whether a speaker’s claim that a certain verb does not have a patient-trigger form is in fact accurate, or whether the consultant is basing this claim on the proscriptive rules of formal written Indonesian? Based on the consultant’s language ideology and the strong prescriptive tradition in Indonesian grammar, such a case is quite possible in the data, and this in fact is true for the next-most-frequent verb stem in the database, bilang ‘say’. There are 121 tokens of bilang ‘say’ in the database. According to Echols and Shadily (1989:80), this verb is considered “colloquial”, and only suffixed forms of this verb can take objects: membilangkan ‘say something’ and membilangi ‘tell someone/ scold’. The dictionary does not list a form dibilang, suggesting that it belongs to the class of intransitive report verbs. It is not discussed in grammars of Indonesian (Sneddon 1996, Wolff 1986, Alwi et al. 1993), probably because of its colloquial nature. But there actually is one occurrence of dibilang in the data: (35) (“Pencuri” IU 3291–3293) 3291 S: Dibilang, pt-say 3292 kalau iri itu, if jealous that.dem 3293 tanda tak mampu. sign neg capable “It’s said: if you’re jealous, it’s a sign of deficiency.”
In this example, the interlocutors are teasing S (Susan) because she is the youngest member of their student household. She replies with this proverb-like expression, essentially saying “you’re just jealous because you don’t have it (i.e. you’re teasing me because you wish you were as young as I am). It appears that the reported material here could be functioning as the trigger of the clause — an issue to which we will return in the next section.
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The two consultants reacted very differently to this sentence when it was presented in elicitation. In the first elicitation session with U, her immediate reaction was to reject it as being completely wrong, and not something that an Indonesian person would say, even after I provided context. U claimed that the form dibilang looks like a foreigner had merely translated it from English “it is said”. She claimed it is completely ungrammatical, and that the way to express this sentence in Indonesian would be to instead use the form orang bilang ‘people say’, katanya ‘word-nya’, or the formal evidential adverbial particle konon (for which no direct gloss exists in English, but would best be translated “they say”). U’s rejection of dibilang was unequivocal in this session. However, in our next session, I brought up this sentence again, and this time explained that it was something which actually occurs in the data. U reacted less negatively to the sentence in this session and stated: “if someone says it then it’s not exactly wrong. I understand the meaning, but I would never say it that way”. She claimed that it isn’t really Indonesian, and again provided the three alternatives listed above which she finds correct. Again she suggested that this person was probably translating from English, or else perhaps is not native to Java (but according to the ethnographic data on S, she is in fact — living in Jakarta for 18 years and Yogyakarta for two). U contacted me two weeks after the second elicitation session, after discussing this verb form with her husband, and decided that it in fact can occur. I would like to suggest that U’s responses and subsequent reconsiderations do not mean that she is somehow not a “competent” speaker of Indonesian. Rather, they reflect the grammatical intuitions typical of a language user steeped in the prescriptive ideology of formal, written language. When confronted with data which is prescriptively not acceptable, a speaker’s intuition is to reject the data as “wrong”. For this reason, the results of intuition-based elicitation of “nonstandard” language must be interpreted with circumspection. The other consultant, L, on the other hand, recognized this sentence as an excerpt from the data which she herself had transcribed, and accepted it in the first elicitation session, but also said that it would be “better” as orang bilang ‘people say’. L claimed that the form dibilang is acceptable when people are “just chatting”, but cannot be used in writing. She said it is “acceptable” but “not part of grammar”. Her explanation for this was that in ordinary daily conversation people don’t follow rules of grammar and cannot be expected to use formal language. The linguistic ideology reflected by both consultants’ views on this construction is fascinating, as well as their ideas that people do not use “grammar” in everyday conversation. Such views appear to be widely held among
Juxtaposed clauses
educated Indonesians — note that both consultants are highly educated, having university degrees in English (one in English linguistics and the other in literature). Further research is clearly warranted into Indonesian folk beliefs about language, as well as the effect of prescriptive traditions imposed by the Indonesian governmental language planning body Pusat Pembinaan Dan Pengembangan Bahasa (Center for Language Development). While interesting, such a discussion lies outside the scope of the present study. However, such reactions demonstrate that the researcher needs to treat with extreme caution the results of eliciting language which is typically considered “informal” or “nonstandard”. It appears that bilang ‘say’ does in fact have a patient-trigger form, albeit rare. From elicitation alone this would not necessarily have been apparent, since it was accepted by the consultants, especially U, only after I had demonstrated that someone actually did use this form. In sum, while there does appear to be evidence that many verbs — more than half the framing verbs in the data — have no patient-trigger form, and thus the clauses which they frame should not be considered core arguments, these findings should be approached with caution. 2.5.2.2Verbs with overt morphology In the previous section I suggested that one argument against a complementation analysis for some framing verbs is the inability for the framed clauses to become the trigger. This rules out considering the non-trigger arguments of more than half the framing verbs in the data as complements, since these verbs have no patient-trigger form and the non-trigger arguments are not indexed by an applicative suffix. Besides “promotion” to trigger, or applicative suffixes, there is no additional morphosyntactic support for a grammatical role of object in Indonesian. In this section I will investigate the converse situation by examining the framing verbs in the database which actually do contain overt patient-trigger morphology and/or applicative suffixes. 2.5.2.2.1Clauses marked as trigger. Only eight of the 263 examples of framed instantiations in the data overtly contain a framing verb with the di- prefix. If it is possible to demonstrate that the framed clause in these examples is the trigger, then we have evidence that these examples are in fact complements — in this case, clauses which are the trigger argument of the verb. Six of these eight patient-trigger examples appear to have the recipient as trigger, rather than the framed clause, and thus are not examples of complementation. However, based on elicitation, these verbs are potentially able to
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take either of the non-agent arguments as trigger, and thus their status is actually debatable. (36) (“Muram” IU 53) K: Saya cuma diberitahu dia mau ngomong. 1sg only pt-inform 3sg want at-talk “I was only told he wanted to talk.”
The framing verb in this example is the compound verb beritahu ‘inform’ (lit. beri ‘give’ plus tahu ‘know’). This is a prototypical example of a patient-trigger clause with no overt agent. Of interest for the present discussion is which of the two non-agent arguments is the trigger: saya ‘I’ which is semantically the recipient, or the clause dia mau ngomong ‘he wants to talk’ which is semantically the theme. If the theme is trigger, then we have evidence for complementation: a clause is the trigger argument of another clause. If the recipient is trigger, then the theme is not a core argument and thus not a complement. In (36), it seems most probable that the recipient saya ‘I’ is the trigger, rather than the clause dia mau ngomong ‘he wants to talk’. Evidence for this comes from the preverbal position of saya ‘I’, which tends to be the typical position for overt triggers in patient-trigger clauses. This would suggest that the framed clause is itself not an argument. However, in elicitation it seems that both the theme or recipient could potentially be trigger, based on their ability to be “extracted” into cleft questions as in the following two elicited examples, both judged acceptable by my consultants. (37) (Elicited) Siapa yang diberitahu, dia mau ngomong? who rel pt-inform 3sg want at-speak “Who was it that was told he wanted to speak?” (Answer: saya)
In this example, the recipient is clearly the trigger, as it is able to be clefted with the relativizer yang, and (formally) only the clause trigger has this property. But as demonstrated by the next example, the semantic theme-argument also has this potential. (38) (Elicited) Apa yang diberitahu kepada saya? what rel pt-inform to 1sg “What was it that was told to me?” (answer: dia mau ngomong ‘he wants to talk.’)
Juxtaposed clauses
In this example, the theme argument is the trigger, and is clefted, while the recipient argument occurs as an oblique marked by the preposition kepada ‘to’. One consultant, while saying that this sentence is acceptable, explained that a better alternative would be: (39) (Elicited) Saya diberitahu apa? 1sg pt-inform what “What was I told?”
In this clause, saya ‘I’ remains the trigger, and the framed material is replaced by the question-word apa. It seems that this form is preferred over (38), but examples such as (38) with the theme-argument as trigger are indeed possible. The six ditransitive verbs in the data which are overtly marked as patient-trigger all show this indeterminacy. At first glance, it seems that the semantic recipient is the trigger, and thus the theme is not an argument (and therefore not a complement). But, one could also make the claim that these examples are simply indeterminate, rather than being definite examples of non-complementation. The case for indeterminacy would be built on the fact that these examples show flexible argument structure in elicitation — the theme-argument could potentially become the trigger (and therefore a complement), and so a complementation analysis cannot simply be dismissed. The remaining 5 indeterminate patient-trigger examples get their indeterminacy by association with the applicative suffix -in, as in the following example. (40) (“Pencuri” IU 1428–1429) 1428 Mbak awas copet, sister careful pickpocket 1429 Aku dibisikin, 1sg pt-whisper-app “‘Watch out, ma’m, there’s a pickpocket’, I was whispered to.”
The initial IU of this example contains reported speech, and the next IU contains the framing verb bisik ‘whisper’. This verb is marked as patient-trigger, and also with the applicative suffix -in. Again, due to its position immediately before the verb, it appears that aku ‘I’ is the trigger, and thus the reportedspeech clause is not a core argument. But again, as demonstrated in elicitation, the -in suffix can be flexible as to whether it indexes the semantic recipient or the theme; if it indexes the recipient, as in the following example, then the theme is not an argument and thus not a complement.
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(41) (Elicited) Siapa yang dibisikin “mbak, awas, copet?” who rel pt-whisper-in sister careful pickpocket “Who was it who was whispered to: ‘ma’am, watch out, pickpocket?’” (answer: aku ‘I’)
This example demonstrates that the semantic recipient aku ‘I’ can be referred to by the applicative suffix -in and “promoted” to trigger with the di- prefix. But the same is true for the theme-argument (the reported-speech clause) as in the following. (42) (Elicited) Apa yang dibisikin kepada aku? what rel pt-whisper-app to 1sg “What was it that was whispered to me?”
In this case, the applicative suffix -in indexes the theme-argument, which is “promoted” to trigger with the di- prefix, and the recipient occurs as an oblique marked with the preposition kepada ‘to’. In the actual example in the database (40), the trigger is most likely the recipient, since it occurs immediately before the di-prefixed verb, and is not preceded by the preposition kepada ‘to’. The remaining four indeterminate examples are parallel, as they are also ditransitive verbs suffixed with -in. The last two examples in the data of framing verbs with overt patienttrigger morphology consist of a reporting verb prefixed by di-, and followed by the framed clause. We have already seen one example in (35) with the verb dibilang followed by a proverb-like quotation. I repeat this example here as (43). (43) (“Pencuri” IU 3291–3293) 3291 S: Dibilang, pt-say 3292 kalau iri itu, if jealous that.dem 3293 tanda tak mampu. sign neg capable “It’s said: if you’re jealous, it’s a sign of deficiency.”
The second example is below in (44). (44) (“Dingdong” IU 591–593) 591 L: Jadi dikira, so pt-guess
Juxtaposed clauses
592
… apa? what 593 Udah habis, already finished “And so he assumed, what’s-it? ‘it’s finished’.”
In this excerpt, Lala is describing watching some kids playing video games at the mall. One particular machine gives the player two games for the price of one, but the kid L was watching apparently didn’t know this, and so left after the first game (and L played the free one). The first IU contains the framing verb kira ‘guess/think/assume’, and is marked patient-trigger, with the unexpressed agent being the kid L was watching. IU 592 consists of a word-search, and IU 593 contains the framed material udah habis ‘it was finished/used up’. Both of these examples contain a framing verb followed by the framed material. Based on the fact that the framing verb is marked with the patienttrigger prefix, and there is no other non-agent argument which could be trigger, one could conclude that the framed material in each example is the trigger, and thus a complement. This is a reasonable approach, and so, for at least two of the 263 framed instantiations in the database, there is evidence that these constructions do in fact meet the formal definition of complementation. However, there are several factors which indicate that this evidence might not be as clear as it seems at first glance. Both examples warrant further discussion. Beginning with (43), as discussed previously, the verb form dibilang is considered extremely unusual by the two consultants. Perhaps this form is more accurately analyzed as an evidential marker of reported speech attributed to an impersonal agent, similar to the forms the consultants prefer: orang bilang (lit. ‘person say’), katanya (lit. ‘word-nya’, cf. 5.3.1) or konon (an adverbial best translated as ‘it is said’/‘they say’). This suggests that the form dibilang might best be understood as an evidential marker with a fixed form and no argument structure at all — just this collocational element contributing to the evidentiality of the utterance. However, since it is the only token of this form in the data, I cannot pursue this hypothesis further. Secondly, as suggested in Munro (1982), ‘say’ verbs tend to be extremely low in transitivity cross-linguistically, and are not typical of those verbs which take objects. Munro suggests that reported speech is best not analyzed as an object of such verbs. Her claims are primarily based on differences between ‘say’ verbs and other prototypically-transitive verbs, and on the nature of the quoted material being different from prototypical NP objects. Both are relevant for the Indonesian data. The restrictions on verb forms have already been discussed
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with reference to the extreme rarity of patient-trigger forms of this verb. The second piece of evidence comes from the material with which bilang ‘say’ cooccurs. Except for the pro-forms ini/itu ‘this/that’ and the question word apa ‘what’, all of which refer to reported speech when used with this verb, bilang ‘say’ only occurs with reported-speech clauses. It never occurs with an NP, unless the NP is the recipient as in the following example. (45) (“Pencuri” IU 3032) A: Dia nggak bilang ibunya, 3sg neg say mother-nya “She didn’t tell her mother.”
In the corpus, bilang ‘say’ never co-occurs with NPs other than recipients, and based on elicitation, it seems unable to do so. The following sentence was judged completely unacceptable by U: (46) (Elicited) *Semua anak-anak bilang jawabannya. all child.redup say answer-nya
When I provided U with the sentence frame: Semua anak-anak bilang ___. (‘All the children said ___’) and would ask her to fill in the blank, she always provided reported speech. When I asked her to fill in the blank with only a single word, she still would provide reported speech (hallo ‘hello’, or sudah ‘that’s all’), and rejected my attempts to fill the blank with an NP (kata ini ‘this word’, or jawaban ‘answer’.) This elicited evidence strongly suggests that bilang ‘say’ is not a prototypical transitive verb in its ability to co-occur with NPs. Similarly, regarding the verb kira ‘guess’ in (44), this verb also does not ever occur with an NP in the database. Like bilang ‘say’, this is not a prototypical objecttaking verb. Also, it is interesting that the framing verb and framed material in this example are separated by a word-search. This suggests the utterance might not have been planned as a single grammatical unit. While such evidence does not directly contradict an analysis of these two examples as instances of complementation, it does suggest that other factors could be at work. 2.5.2.2.2Clauses indexed by an applicative suffix. In cases where a framed clause is not marked as trigger, it still could be a clausal argument if we can show that it is indexed by an applicative suffix. Non-trigger arguments indexed by the applicative suffixes -in, -kan, and -i function as the grammatical “object” of a clause in that they can then be “promoted” to trigger. 33 of the 263 examples in
Juxtaposed clauses
the database consist of a framing verb suffixed with one of these morphemes: 12 with -in, 19 with -kan, and 2 with -i. The 12 examples with the -in suffix consist of ditransitive verbs, and are indeterminate as to which of the non-agent arguments is being indexed by the suffix. (5 of these 12 examples additionally contain the patient-trigger prefix di-, and were included among the 8 patient-trigger examples discussed in 2.5.2.2.1.) This suffix, as demonstrated in the elicitation discussed in the previous section, is flexible and can index either the recipient or the theme argument. These 12 examples are therefore indeterminate. The two examples with the -i suffix are both cases in which the framed clause is indexed by the suffix, and is thus an argument and complement. Interestingly, these two occurrences both come from the two speech events which are more formal — the call-in radio show about Islam (“Tanya-Jawab”) and the student discussion group meeting (“Muram”). The formal nature of these speech events will figure prominently in the discussion of “complementizers” in the next chapter, but for now I will simply say that the occurrence of the -i suffix seems to be based partially on formality. In the following example, the verb mengakui ‘acknowledge’ takes the framed clause itu muram ‘it’s gloomy’ as an object. (47) (“Muram” IU 1108) Bahwa memang Baba sendiri mengakui itu muram bahwa indeed Baba self at-acknowledge-app that.dem gloomy gitu lho. thus prt “That even Baba himself acknowledges it’s gloomy.”
(This example is part of a larger instance of reported speech containing the discourse-marker bahwa which I will discuss in the next chapter.) The other -i example is similar, but too detailed and convoluted to include in its entirety. In the excerpt below, the verb nyetujui ‘agree to’ begins to introduce a clause, but the clause is abandoned before completion. (48) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 1601) D: Dia mau nyetujui daripada berbuat .. begitu, 3sg want at-agree-app instead.of mid-do thus “She agreed that instead of doing that…”
Examples (47) and (48) are the only two examples in the database of a framing verb suffixed with -i. In both examples the framed clause appears to be indexed
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by the suffix (although in (48) this is hard to know for sure since the remainder of the framed material is never fully completed). So, it appears that these two examples can be considered true instances of grammatical complementation. The remaining 19 examples contain the suffix -kan (12 of which occur in the “Tanya-Jawab” speech event). 5 of these are clearly not indexing clauses as arguments. Instead, they index either an anaphoric pronoun (as in (49) below) or the unexpressed head of a headless relative clause (as in (50)). (49) (“Muram” IU 38–42) 38 … Trus yang keempat, then rel fourth 39 .. e=, um 40 ini ya mungkin perlu saya bicarakan sama temen-temen, this prt maybe need 1sg speak-app with friend.redup 41 E tadi itu, um just.now that.dem 42 ada anak psikologi datang. ex child psychology come “And fourthly, um, maybe I should discuss this with all of you: um, just now there was a psychology student who came…”
The framing verb bicarakan ‘discuss’ occurs in IU 40, and the remainder of the example consists of the framed material — what it is the speaker wishes to discuss. The verb bicarakan ‘discuss’ is a patient-trigger verb with pronominal agent, as indicated by the order AUX-A-V. The trigger of this clause — the nonagent argument indexed by -kan — is the demonstrative ini ‘this’ in the same IU. Here this demonstrative functions cataphorically, referring to the framed material. But the framed material itself is not a core argument of this verb — the trigger is ini ‘this’ in IU 40. The next example is similar; here, the trigger is the unexpressed head of a headless relative, and the framed material is not a core argument. (50) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 1174–1175) 1174 E: Memang sebenarnya yang perlu kita pikirkan, indeed true-nya rel need 1pl think-app 1175 … kita bedakan antara pemimpin dan penguasa, 1pl differ-app between leader and authority “Indeed what we actually need to think about is: we differentiate between leader and authority.”
Juxtaposed clauses
Similar to (49) this example consists of a patient-trigger clause with pronominal agent (as indicated by AUX-A-V word-order). The patient-trigger verb in this clause is pikirkan ‘consider’ in IU 1174, which frames the clause in IU 1175. The trigger of this verb is actually unexpressed, but is the head of the relative clause yang perlu kita pikirkan ‘that which we need to think about’. This head is coreferential with the framed clause in IU 1175, which itself is not the trigger. The remaining three examples are parallel — the trigger is the unexpressed head of the relative clause, not the framed material. Thus 5 of the 19 occurrences of framing verbs suffixed with -kan are not instances of grammatical complementation, since the framed clause is not a core argument. 7 of the remaining 14 instances of a framing verbs suffixed with -kan are ditransitive, and appear to be flexible as to which of the non-agent arguments is indexed. For example, the verb doa ‘pray’ occurs five times in the database with the applicative suffix -kan. Two such occurrences are in (51) below. The first seems to index the theme argument, and the second seems to index the benefactive. (51) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 1915–1926) 1915 N: Kalau, if 1916 .. sekarang misalnya, now example-nya 1917 yang beda agama tu pencuri gitu ya. rel different religion that.dem thief thus prt 1918 T: E-e? aff 1919 N: Itu kita mendoakan semoga dia kembali ke jalan yang benar. that.dem 1pl at-pray-app may.it.be 3sg return to way rel true 1920 Semoga dia nggak nyuri lagi, may.it.be 3sg neg at-steal again 1921 Itu boleh nggak. that.dem may neg 1922 T: Boleh. may 1923 jadi kalau me=ndoakan orang, so if at-pray-app person
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1924 agar menghentikan. purp at-stop-app 1925 … hal jelek menjadi hal baik itu, thing bad become thing good that.dem 1926 .. boleh. may. “(N:) Say now for example there’s someone of a different religion who is a thief. (T:) Mhm? (N:) And for him we pray: ‘may he return to the true way. May he not steal again’. Is that allowed, or not? (T:) It’s allowed. So if you pray for someone, so that they’ll stop, and something bad will become something good, that’s allowed.”
This excerpt is part of a discussion between the caller and cleric/talk show host about praying for non-Muslims. The cleric has just explained that it is forbidden for Muslims to pray that Allah will forgive the sins of non-Muslims. In this excerpt, the caller is giving a specific example of a prayer, and asking if it is allowed or not. In IU 1919 the suffix -kan seems to index the proposition of the prayer, while in IU 1923 it appears to index the benefactive argument of the prayer. According to the dictionary entry for this verb (Echols and Shadily 1989: 146), when used with the -kan suffix it indexes the theme, not the benefactive: “pray for s.t. (to happen)”. However, the example given in this same dictionary entry actually does not match the definition and in fact indexes the benefactive: Ibulah yang selalu saya doakan. mother-prt rel always 1sg pray-app “I always pray for Mother.”
Thus it seems the -kan suffix when used with the verb doa ‘pray’ is flexible and can index either the benefactive or the theme. Here is one more example from the corpus (not a framed instantiation) of doakan indexing the benefactive rather than the theme. (52) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 1873–1874) 1873 N: .. E= kalau mendoakan orang yang beda agama, um if men-pray-app person rel different religion 1874 boleh nggak. may neg “If you pray for someone of a different religion, is it okay or not?”
For 7 of the 19 instances of -kan, this suffix seems to be flexible as to which of the non-agent arguments it indexes, and thus the status of these framed clauses
Juxtaposed clauses
is indeterminate. The remaining 7 occurrences in the database of framing verbs suffixed with -kan are not ditransitive, and there is no doubt as to the argument indexed by the suffix. There are 7 examples like the following, in which the suffix is clearly indexing a clause: (53) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 1077–1081) 1077 (H) Saya lebih ingin, 1sg more want 1078 me- — trunc 1079 lebih suka untuk mengatakan, more like purp at-word-app 1080 silahkanlah keluarga itu menentukan, go.ahead-prt family that.dem at-certain-app 1081 … cara berhubungan yang paling baik bagi mereka berdua way mid-connect rel most good for 3pl mid-two gitu lho. thus prt “I prefer to say: let the family go ahead and determine the best way of relating for the two of them.”
This example comes from a segment of the Islamic call-in show in which a caller had asked a question about the meaning of certain Koran verses. These verses suggest that men are the leaders/protectors of women. The caller has posed a question as to the meaning of this for the relationship between husband and wife, and the cleric responds by saying that this issue is up to each family individually, as cited in the present example. The framing verb mengatakan ‘say’ occurs in IU 1079, and the framed material (the speaker’s own reported speech) comprises the rest of the example. The verb mengatakan ‘say’ consists of the root kata ‘word’, with the agent-trigger prefix and an applicative suffix. The material indexed by this suffix appears to be the framed material — thus it is a grammatical object, and meets the definition of complementation. The remaining 6 examples are similar, suggesting that at least 7 of the framing verbs suffixed with -kan take a clause as a complement. In sum, this section has examined the co-occurrence of framed clauses with overt verbal morphology. There are 36 framing verbs marked with verbal affixes: 33 with suffixes and 8 with prefixes (5 of the 8 prefixed verbs additionally contain a suffix, and therefore should only be counted once — making the
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total 36 rather than 41). Of the 8 occurrences of a framing verb prefixed with the patient-trigger prefix di-, 6 are indeterminate, in that either non-agent argument could be analyzed as trigger. The remaining two examples appear to have the framed clause as trigger. Of the 33 verbs containing an applicative suffix, 19 are indeterminate (including the 5 indeterminate prefixed verbs), 5 have a non-clausal argument as trigger, and 9 appear to have a clause as trigger. Thus, based on verbal morphology, 11 of the 263 examples of framed instantiations in the database, a mere 4.18%, appear to be complements — a clause functioning as a grammatical argument. Even if, for the sake of discussion, we were to assume that all 20 examples I have claimed are indeterminate are actually complements, this raises the total to 31 out of 263, or still only 11.79% of the data. However, these 20 ditransitive examples are only “indeterminate” insofar as they have the grammatical potential in elicitation to take either of two non-agent arguments as an object; as they actually occur in the corpus, they seem to be indexing recipients rather than theme-argument clauses. Therefore I think the appropriate analysis of these examples in the data is to consider them not to be instances of complementation. In some other potential context they could be, but not as they occur in this Indonesian corpus. 2.5.2.3Discussion and implications What does it mean, then, for a morphosyntactic category of complementation in Indonesian that only 4.18% of framed clauses in the data can be justified to be complements? Clearly complementation is not a robust category for speakers of Indonesian. There is no overt morphosyntactic marking of this category (markers of dependency, subordination, or case), and in order to justify even this small percentage of the data, the analyst must rely on what amounts to argumentation based on circumstantial evidence: verb morphology plus a clause indicates that the clause is in fact an argument of the verb. If one accepts this line of evidence, then we can indeed accept roughly 4.18 percent of the data as complementation. But what about the roughly 89–96% of the data which cannot be justified as grammatical complements? It seems the analyst has two choices. (i) Claim that by analogy, the remaining 96% of framed instantiations are complements. This strikes me as empirically irresponsible. Or (ii) acknowledge that it is indeed possible to argue for a complementation analysis for a small fraction of the data, but that such an analysis misses the point for the majority of examples. The remaining 96% of framed instantiations in the data, while they do possess the semantic characteristics of what, in other languages, are often encoded by
Juxtaposed clauses
grammatical complements, simply do not possess any morphosyntactic features to justify inclusion in the grammatical category of complementation. The overwhelming majority of the examples of framed instantiations in the database simply consist of juxtaposed clauses related semantically, but with no grammatical connection, overt or otherwise. As such, Indonesian seems not to have grammaticized complementation as a robust category or as a grammatical resource for speakers in everyday interaction. One major implication of this approach is that it quite naturally leads to the claim that complementation in the corpus is simply epiphenomenal, and not a grammatical category at all. It is observable post-hoc by the analyst, but is not a robust construction for speakers in everyday interaction. This claim is grounded in work in emergent grammar (e.g. Hopper 1987, 1988, 1998), in which “grammar” is understood to consist of routinized schemas and patterns, generalized from the structures which most frequently emerge in the fulfillment of speakers’ communicative goals: “the more useful a construction is, the more it will tend to become structuralized, in the sense of achieving cross-textual consistency, and serving as a basis for variation and extension” (1987: 150). As applied to the present study, it is the semantics of framing verbs which evokes the potential for the presence of another clause. For example, when a speaker uses a verb like bilang ‘say’, or tahu ‘know’, the speaker can also say (and frequently does say) what it is that was ‘said’ or ‘known’, which often turns out to be a clause. Between 4–11 percent of the time in the data, these clauses happen to be in such a position that they end up being the overt trigger or the indexed applicative argument of a transitive framing verb. But, I argue, this is not a result of speakers deploying a top-down “complementation construction” to form a sentence, but it simply falls out as a structural byproduct of a clause happening to co-occur with a particular semantic class of verbs. In some languages, the overt marking of core arguments is much more robust, and speakers have grammaticized the co-occurrence of framed instantiations to such an extent as to mark them overtly as complements. In the colloquial Indonesian data however, grammatical complementation is only observable covertly, and its occurrence is so rare (between 4–11 percent of framed instantiations in the database), that this category is not grammaticized. It is observable after the fact by analysts searching for traces of grammatical complementation, but it is simply too rare to be a viable grammatical category for language users. To draw a parallel with grammatical relations in English, some English verbs have an argument structure which follows an ergative-absolutive pattern. E.g. ‘the water boiled’ and ‘John boiled the water’, or ‘John sleeps’ and ‘This tent
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sleeps four’ this is not the result of English-speakers deploying an “ergative construction”, but is instead based on the semantic potential of some particular verbs. No linguist would claim, based on the rare instances of verbs in discourse which semantically allow this pattern, that English is an ergative language. Ergativity is not grammaticized for speakers of English in the same way that it is for speakers of some other languages. So, while analysts searching for ergativity in English can find traces of it in the co-occurrence patterns of some verbs and their arguments, “ergativity” is not a productive category for English languageusers in interactional contexts; rather, it emerges based on the semantic potential of certain verbs, and the communicative goals of speakers in a particular context. Similarly, based on the rare occurrence of framed instantiations in the Indonesian data which can be justified as grammatical complements, and the fact that Indonesian lacks overt signals of complementation in general, I would like to claim that although traces of complementation are indeed observable in the data, complementation per se is not a robust category for Indonesian language-users. Instead, the semantics of framing verbs allow these verbs to co-occur with other clauses, but this co-occurrence has not grammaticized for Indonesian speakers any more than is the category of ergative for English speakers. In colloquial Indonesian, examples of grammatical complementation are not grammaticized to the same extent as they are in languages with a richer system of dependency and case marking.
2.6 Summary In this chapter I have provided a discussion of juxtaposed clauses in the Indonesian corpus — clauses which appear to have some sort of semantic relationship to each other, but which are not linked by any overt connective marker. I have focused primarily on those clauses which I have called framed instantiations, which have traditionally been analyzed as complements. In Section 2.2 I presented examples of juxtaposed clauses, defined framed instantiations, and demonstrated that juxtaposed clauses can encode a variety of semantic relationships, including conditionals, concessives, adversatives, and temporally sequenced clauses. These clause complexes are grammatically and prosodically parallel to framed instantiations, suggesting that there is nothing intrinsic about juxtaposed clauses per se which would indicate a particular type of interclausal relation. In Section 2.3 I characterized the prosody of framed instantiations, and
Juxtaposed clauses
observed three basic types: clauses which occur as increments, clauses distributed over two or more IUs, and clauses which are packaged into a single IU. I suggested a constellation of factors which, taken together, lead to the different prosodic types. In Section 2.4 I pursued a semantic description of both the framing clause as well as the framed material. Based on previous semantic characterizations of complementation, I noted parallels between framed instantiations in the Indonesian corpus and how other researchers have described complements in other languages. The last section of this chapter consists of a morphosyntactic description of framed instantiations. I sought to address the question of whether Indonesian morphosyntax provides any evidence regarding the status of these clause complexes as grammatical complements. Based on the extremely small number of examples which can be justified as instances of grammatical complementation (between 4–11 percent of the framed instantiations in the database), I claimed that complementation is indeed not a robust, grammaticized category for speakers of colloquial Indonesian. This chapter has focused only on juxtaposed clauses, which contain no overt connective markers. In the next chapter, I will analyze clauses linked by connectives which have often been called complementizers. Specifically, I will investigate the Indonesian word bahwa and whether its occurrence can be used to justify grammatical complementation in the Indonesian corpus.
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Chapter 3
Complementizers in context An analysis of bahwa
3.1 Introduction In the previous chapter, I examined the occurrence of juxtaposed clauses with no overt connective markers. These are the most frequent type of construction in the database which have traditionally been analyzed as complements. I will devote the current chapter to the issue of putative complementizers in the Indonesian corpus, specifically the word bahwa. This word is generally considered a complementizer, introducing clauses after verbs of speech or cognition, as in the following example. (1) (“Muram” IU 1345–1350) 1345 … Kayak kayak, like like 1346 .. Jim Morrison itu. Jim Morrison that.dem 1347 Seolah-olah, as.if 1348 … cuma dia, only 3sg 1349 .. yang tahu, rel know 1350 bahwa dunia ini bobrok gitu lho. bahwa world this degenerate thus prt “Like Jim Morrison. It’s as if only he was the one who knew that this world is degenerate.”
In this example, the framing verb tahu ‘know’ occurs in IU 1349, followed by a clause in IU 1350 specifying what it was that Jim Morrison allegedly knew: dunia ini bobrok ‘this world is degenerate’. This is parallel to the examples of framed instantiations presented in the previous chapter, except in this case the
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framed clause is preceded by the word bahwa. This word has no lexical meaning in Indonesian, and seems to function to introduce clauses, as in the above example. For this reason, it is typically analyzed as a complementizer or clause introducer (cf. Sneddon 1996; Wolff 1986). There are 55 tokens of this word in the corpus, and I will devote this chapter to a close analysis of bahwa in the data, to address the question of whether its occurrence justifies positing a grammatical category of complementation for colloquial Indonesian. Cross-linguistically, the primary evidence for grammatical complementation comes from a complement clause being marked as subordinate to another clause. Since Indonesian does not distinguish between finite and nonfinite verbs, does not mark case, and does not have other morphology to indicate subordination, the only overt evidence for this would come from the presence of complementizers. I will begin this chapter with an overview of the general distribution of bahwa, followed by examples of its different functions in the data. I will show that while bahwa does, in some instances, serve to link a framing verb with a framed clause, there is no evidence that it fulfills a “subordinating” function. Furthermore, there are additional uses which must be accounted for, reflecting larger, discourse-structuring functions. I will claim that bahwa is best understood as a discourse marker which occurs in formal registers of Indonesian, providing local coherence within a text, and introducing a clause or stretch of discourse as a projection (Halliday 1994). Its putative role as a complementizer is simply a reflection of these larger, discourse-level functions, and does not imply the existence of a grammatical class of complements per se in Indonesian. First, some observations are in order regarding the limitations of current understanding of complementizers. As defined by Noonan, a complementizer is: “a word, particle, clitic, or affix, one of whose functions it is to identify the entity as a complement” (Noonan 1985: 44). This definition is insightful in that it recognizes the general multifunctional nature of these morphemes, but it is problematic in languages such as Indonesian, where the existence of complements is up for debate. In the present context, Noonan’s definition can lead to inherent circularity. It presupposes the existence of complements as such, and defines a complementizer as a morpheme which introduces them. Thus it would be counter-productive to argue that these complement-like constructions in Indonesian are in fact complements because they contain complementizers, since the definition of complementizer itself relies on the existence of complements. Secondly, the status of complementizers is not uncontroversial. Hudson (1995) has argued that ‘complementizer’ is not a genuine word-class or
Complementizers in context
grammatical category. Rather, those forms which have traditionally been classified as complementizers are actually members of other word-classes, fulfilling more diverse syntactic functions: “it [the category ‘complementizer’] looks suspiciously like a dustbin for the words which can introduce a complement-clause but which do not seem to belong to any other word-class such as ‘pronoun’ or ‘preposition’, rather than a word-class which plays an essential role in the grammar” (Hudson 1995: 42) Because of such definitional inadequacies, for the remainder of this chapter I would like to suspend judgment on the question of whether bahwa is actually a complementizer: it has generally been interpreted as such in grammars of Indonesian, and I will approach this issue by examining the generalizations about bahwa which emerge from the data. What kinds of functions does bahwa fulfill? What types of constructions regularly occur with it? And what does the general weight of this evidence tell us about this word and these constructions? There are three additional forms in the database which have variously been analyzed as complementizers: kalau ‘if ’, untuk ‘in order to’, and agar ‘so that’. However, these are extremely rare in the data and appear to function primarily as adverbials or purposive markers, as suggested by their glosses. It is not clear whether clauses introduced by kalau ‘if ’ should not simply be considered instances of a larger category of adverbial, conditional or topicalized clauses, and whether untuk ‘for/in order to’ is not more generally a preposition (cf. Hudson 1995 for a similar point about complementizers in English). I do recognize their presence in the data, but will not further pursue an analysis of these morphemes here. This chapter will focus on bahwa, since it is the most frequently occurring form in the data of a putative complementizer, and it has no additional lexical meaning.
3.2 Distributional factors One of the most striking aspects of bahwa in the corpus is its complete absence from four of the speech events. As discussed previously in 1.2.1, the corpus is divided roughly into two types of spoken language: four of the speech events (“Pencuri”, “Dingdong”, “Blewah”, and “Wisuda”) comprise informal face-toface conversational data, while the remaining two (“Muram” and “TanyaJawab”) represent more-formal, discussion-oriented material. Bahwa never occurs at all in the informal, interactional data, but is frequent in the formal, discussion-oriented material. I would like to propose that this skewed distribution
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reflects register differences, wherein the more-formal, stylized speech events are closely modeled on stereotypical written Indonesian, while the more-colloquial conversational interactions are not. In order to begin to assess the plausibility of this claim, I undertook broad text counts of bahwa in two varieties of written Indonesian: a small corpus of modern Indonesian short stories (Satyagraha Hoerip (ed.) 1986. Cerita Pendek Indonesia III. Jakarta: Gramedia.), and articles from two issues of the Kompas newspaper (22 news articles between January 16–17, 2000; http://www.kompas.com). My findings are summarized in Table 1. Table 1.Distribution of bahwa in spoken and written corpora Corpus
Bahwa tokens
Total words
Bahwa/thousand
Spoken Informal Conversation Formal Discussion
0 55
24,074 12,191
0 4.512
Written Short Stories Newspaper
171 44
73,491 13,933
2.327 3.158
Two generalizations emerge from these text counts, both of which deserve further explication. (i) Bahwa is indeed frequent in written Indonesian and in the formal discussions, while it is categorically absent from the more-informal speech events in the data. (ii) The rate of occurrence of bahwa in the moreformal spoken data is actually higher than in either of the written genres. Regarding the first generalization, we observe that in terms of the presence of bahwa, the discussion-oriented spoken data is more like written Indonesian than it is like colloquial conversation. This supports a multidimensional view of register; rather than a simple, binary opposition of two modes of language — written and spoken — a variety of factors co-occur in determining register. Finegan and Biber (1994) recognize the multifaceted nature of this issue, and suggest the classification of language along a continuum from “literate” to “oral”. “A variety can be called literate to the extent that it has the situational and linguistic characteristics associated with stereotypical writing; a variety can be called oral to the extent that it has the situational and linguistic characteristics stereotypically associated with speech” (Finegan and Biber 1994:326). These authors review and summarize the observation that “literate” and “oral” registers are generally marked by “elaboration” and “economy” respectively. In
Complementizers in context
other words, “literate” registers are more elaborate — marked by more explicit grammatical forms, e.g. full NPs, longer words and more complex sentences, and the presence of phonological or grammatical variants often absent in speech. On the other hand, “oral” registers tend toward economy of expression, e.g. shorter forms and less elaboration: “We further consider such linguistic economy to be indicative of a greater degree of implicit meaning, with a greater reliance on contextual channels rather than lexicon and syntax” (Finegan and Biber 1994: 320). Within the context of this present study, Finegan and Biber’s approach is quite relevant. Bahwa is an elaborated form found in “literate” registers of Indonesian. The more economical variant, the absence of bahwa, is characteristic of the more “oral” registers. While a comprehensive register analysis lies outside the scope of this study, the basic division of the corpus into “literate” and “oral” speech events receives further support from additional morphemes in the data displaying similar distribution. For instance, the copula adalah is often used in equational sentences in written Indonesian. Like bahwa, it appears to be a categorical variable. There are no instances at all of adalah in the four informal speech events, while the two “literate” speech events “Muram” and Tanya-Jawab” contain 4 and 26 tokens of adalah respectively. Similarly, written Indonesian and the more “literate” speech events tend to employ the “elaborate” agenttrigger prefix meN- while in similar grammatical contexts the four “oral” speech events employ the “economy” variant of the agent-trigger prefix N-, or use no prefix at all. However, unlike bahwa and adalah, the distribution of these verbal prefixes is not categorical but a matter of degree. There are tokens of each variant (meN-, N-, and no prefix) in all of the speech events, but a greater tendency toward meN- in the “literate” varieties and a greater tendency toward N- or no prefix in the “oral” speech events. Thus the distribution of adalah and the verbal prefixes provide further justification for the register contrast suggested by the distribution of bahwa. The second observation which emerges from the text counts presented in Table 1 is somewhat surprising. Why is it that the rate of occurrence of bahwa is higher in the more-formal spoken data (4.512 tokens per thousand words) than in either of the written text types (2.327 tokens per thousand in short stories, and 3.158 tokens per thousand in newspaper articles)? To pursue this slight discrepancy in distribution, it is instructive to examine the rate of occurrence of bahwa in each of the two speech events separately, as illustrated in Table 2. As described in greater depth in 1.2.1, “Tanya-Jawab” is a recording of a radio call-in show hosted by an Islamic scholar and a radio announcer.
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“Muram” is an excerpt from an informal, university-student discussion group which meets monthly to discuss art, literature, and music. Table 2.Distribution of bahwa in the discussion-oriented spoken data Speech event
Bahwa tokens
Total words
Bahwa/thousand
“Tanya-Jawab” “Muram”
22 33
6,801 5,390
3.235 6.122
From these text counts, we observe that the rate of occurrence of bahwa is substantially higher in “Muram” than in “Tanya-Jawab”. One result of this difference across the two speech events is to skew the overall amount of bahwa upward for this genre, especially given the limited size of the corpus. Perhaps the rate of distribution is simply an artifact of database size, and given a larger corpus of discussion-oriented material, this discrepancy between the written and discussion-oriented data would be minimized. However, this leads to a further question: why is the rate of occurrence in “Muram” so high in the first place? I would like to propose an explanation for this observation based on the nature of this particular speech event. I suggest that the comparatively high rate of occurrence of bahwa in “Muram” — approximately twice that found in written Indonesian — is a result of hypercorrection: speakers in this speech event are aiming for a formal, “literate” register, and the language variety they produce ends up in many respects appearing more “literate” than the written variety itself. One of the strongest pieces of qualitative evidence for this comes from the spontaneous reactions of two of the Indonesian research assistants. During transcription and glossing of this segment, both of them independently expressed a strong aversion to working with this particular recording. When I questioned them further about their dislike of this recording, each of them expressed the opinion that several of the speakers are “arrogant”, or “pompous”, or “showing off”. One of the research assistants described the speakers as “using a lot of fancy words without really saying anything”. As described in 1.2.1, “Muram” is a recording of a monthly discussion group of university students, who meet informally to talk about art, music, and literature. As such, this group forms a relatively specialized social network, and we would expect language to be used to a certain degree to both define the situation and maintain group identity and ‘common ground’ among participants. While a complete analysis of the situated
Complementizers in context
nature of this group and the socio-cultural markers of group identity lie outside the scope of this chapter, several linguistic factors do serve to define the situation as formal, and to convey an impression of sophistication and erudition. These include extremely long turns with little competition for the floor, the frequent use of English borrowings, and the use of fancy-sounding affixed forms of certain verbs (which my research assistants judged as contrived, and which do not appear in Indonesian dictionaries). Additionally, there are several examples in the data (such as (19) below) whose meanings are rather opaque, and “make no sense” according to the research assistants. These characteristics will be apparent in several of the examples from “Muram” presented later in this chapter. In sum, the distribution of bahwa in the corpus can be explained in terms of register. The two more-formal speech events — “Tanya-Jawab” and “Muram” — represent a “literate” register of Indonesian, similar to the stereotypical, formal, written variety. This register is characterized by greater linguistic “elaboration” such as the use of bahwa. Furthermore, the especially high rate of occurrence in “Muram” compared with “Tanya-Jawab” is due to social aspects of the situation: a desire to represent and maintain group identity through the use of this literate-sounding language. So far in this section I have presented evidence regarding the use of bahwa as a sociolinguistic marker of register difference. This leads quite naturally to the question of motivation. Why would this particular word have become so strongly associated with “literate” registers of Indonesian? First, we must bear in mind that bahwa, as with sociolinguistic variables in general, also functions as a specific linguistic unit: it contributes some type of semantic, pragmatic, or syntactic information to the discourse. Presumably, its sociolinguistic status has arisen because of the general linguistic functions it fulfills, and the social values speakers place on these functions. With this in mind, in the contexts where bahwa is present, what kind of pragmatic/semantic/syntactic work does it do? I will now focus on this question, exploring the formal and functional aspects of this word. This is an especially interesting question given the approach usually taken toward this morpheme, and toward complementizers in general. Many linguists simply assume that the default case is the presence of a complementizer, and the complementizer is sometimes “deleted”. As a reflection of this assumption, generative linguists posited an empty category slot for COMP. An analysis based on “deletion” or “omission” of complementizers has carried over into much descriptive grammatical work too: “When a bahwa clause is object or complement
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bahwa can be omitted” (Sneddon 1996: 292). But the evidence from the data suggests that it is just the opposite. Based on the 55 occurrences of bahwa in the corpus, as opposed to the 263 cases of juxtaposed clauses with no connective described in the last chapter, it seems that what needs explanation is actually the presence of bahwa, not its absence. In this section, I have suggested that one major factor in its occurrence is closely related to formality and register. For the remainder of this chapter I will describe its use as an element in larger grammatical and discourse constructions. The 55 bahwa clauses in the corpus fall into three groups, based on their syntactic distribution. Some co-occur with verbal predicates, some co-occur with NPs, and others appear to stand on their own as unframed clauses. The following table lists the numbers of each type in the corpus. I will discuss each of these types in turn below. Since bahwa only occurs in “Muram” and “TanyaJawab”, all examples of bahwa in the remainder of this chapter will of course be from those two speech events. Table 3.Types of bahwa clauses Type
Number
Verbal Noun Unframed
29 17 9
Total
55
3.3 Bahwa after verbal predicates The following two examples illustrate the use of bahwa after a verbal predicate and are similar to example (1) presented above. All three of these examples consist of a framing verb followed by bahwa and then the framed clause. (2) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 771–775) 771 .. (H) Dan=, and 772 ingat bahwa, remember bahwa 773 .. di jaman dahulu, at era previous
Complementizers in context
774
.. persoalan yang sangat dipentingkan adalah, issue rel very pt-important-app cop 775 persoalan fisik kan. issue physical prt “And remember that in past times, the things that were most important were physical things.”
(3) (“Muram” IU 5–7) 5 .. paling nggak saya, at.most neg 1sg 6 … pernah mendengar bahwa Ikun, ever at-hear bahwa Ikun 7 akan memberikan saya soal tentang tawaran yang kemarin itu. will at-give-app 1sg problem about offering rel yesterday that.dem “At least I’ve heard that Ikun is going to give me a discussion about the (musical) offering from the other day.”
In (2), the framing verb ingat ‘remember’ is followed by bahwa and a clause identifying the information the speaker wants the hearer to remember. In (3), the verb dengar ‘hear’ is followed by a clause explaining what it was that the speaker has heard. As discussed above, in (1), the verb tahu ‘know’ is followed by bahwa and a clause specifying the information which Jim Morrison allegedly knew. Semantically, all three of these examples contain a verb which sets up a generic frame or background (knowing, remembering, or hearing). I will address these framing verbs more fully in 3.3.2. The framing verb is followed by bahwa and then a clause which fills in the frame by presenting a concrete and specific instance — in these examples, what is known, remembered, or heard. I will refer to these clauses as projections, since the bahwa clause in these examples (and in all 55 examples in the database) corresponds to Halliday’s (1994) category of projections. I introduced this term in the previous chapter, as it was a useful way of characterizing many of the instantiating clauses in the juxtaposed clause examples. Unlike the juxtaposed clauses in the previous chapter, some of which referred to actual real-world events, all 55 bahwa clauses in the database are in fact projections, referring to linguistic descriptions of events rather than to the events themselves. Again, as defined by Halliday, a projection is: “the logical-semantic relationship whereby a clause comes to function not as a direct representation of (nonlinguistic) experience but as a representation of a (linguistic) representation” (Halliday 1994: 250). In other
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words, a projection is a reformulation of an experience coded in language, and Halliday identifies three types. i.
“Reports”, corresponding to verbal representation of speech in a discourse. None of the three preceding examples falls into this category, since they do not contain direct verbal representation of an utterance; but many others in this chapter do, such as (6) below, which contains a bahwa clause framed by the verb bilang ‘say’. ii. “Ideas”, characterized as mental/cognitive events being talked about using language. Examples (1) and (3) represent this category: (1) is a representation of Jim Morrison’s thoughts/knowledge, and (3) is a mental representation (not a verbal presentation as with a “report”) of something which Ikun (one of the members of the group) has previously told the speaker. iii. “Facts”, defined as impersonal projections which come prepackaged in language and are not directly reported or thought by a specific agent. The bahwa clause in (2) would be a “fact”, since it is impersonal — someone has already said or thought this, and it is being presented to the interlocutor as a linguistically pre-packaged chunk to be “remembered”, but the source of this idea is not specified. Notice also that the position of bahwa is variable with respect to the IU containing the framing verb, as well as to the IU containing the projection. In (2), bahwa occurs IU-finally in the same IU as the framing verb, and in fact is immediately adjacent to it. In (3), bahwa occurs in the same IU as the framing verb, and is immediately followed by the subject of the projection, also in that same IU. In (1), there is an IU break between the framing verb and bahwa, and bahwa occurs in the same IU as the projection. Thus these three examples illustrate three distinct types of prosodic grouping, suggesting that there is no single, fixed prosodic description of bahwa clauses. 3.3.1 Noncontiguity
All three of the above examples consist of a framing verb followed by bahwa, and a projection in a subsequent clause. These three components are all immediately adjacent to each other, with no intervening material. However, such adjacency is not always present. There are 9 noncontiguous examples in the data which I have coded as instances of a bahwa clause co-occurring with a verbal predicate, despite the presence of intervening material. The following three examples, (4)–(6), illustrate the types of noncontiguity in the data.
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The first, rather lengthy example below, consists of three bahwa clauses, all of which I have coded as co-occurring with a verbal predicate. However, only one of the three clauses is actually immediately adjacent to the framing verb. The remaining two bahwa clauses are not immediately preceded by a verb, but the framing verb is readily inferable and available from the discourse context. (4) (“Muram” IU 1220–1233) 1220 .. Selama ini kan, as.long this prt 1221 kita menganggap, 1pl at-opinion 1222 bahwa nggak ada resistensi gitu. bahwa neg ex resistance thus 1223 .. Bahwa rakyat itu, bahwa people that.dem 1224 selalu lemah berdaya, always weak energy 1225 harus ditolong gitu ya. have.to pt-help thus prt 1226 .. Na, well 1227 harus ditolong gitu kan, have.to pt-help thus prt 1228 bahwa kita, bahwa 1pl 1229 punya punya punya kemampuan untuk menolong mereka, possess possess possess ability for at-help 3pl 1230 punya kekuasaan yang lebih. possess strength rel more 1231 .. Punya resistensi yang lebih besar. possess resistance rel more big 1232 Dari dari rakyat misalnya. from from people example-nya 1233 … Selalu selalu seperti itu kan. always always like that.dem prt “So far we’ve assumed that there isn’t any resistance. That the (common) people don’t have any energy and have to be helped. So they have to be helped, right? That we have the ability to help them. We have more power. We have greater resistance. Than the (common) people for example. It’s always like that, isn’t it?”
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In this example, the verb menganggap ‘assume’ in IU 1221 frames the remaining IUs as an assumption. This assumption consists of several clauses, in IUs 1222–1233. Each of the clauses in the assumption enumerates what it is that kita (the first-person inclusive pronoun, which is often used generically) has been assuming. IU 1222 consists of a bahwa clause syntactically adjacent to the verb in IU 1221 — similar to the examples we have seen so far. After this IU there is a final intonation contour, followed by another bahwa clause parallel to the first, with the subject rakyat itu “the common people” in IU 1223, and the predicate in IU 1224. This is still part of the ‘assumption’ framed by the verb menganggap ‘assume’ in IU 1221, but this bahwa clause is both syntactically and prosodically noncontiguous with the verb menanggap, since there is both an intervening clause and a final intonation contour in IU 1222. IUs 1225–1227 consist of two more clauses, still part of the assumption, but not introduced by bahwa. The verbs in both these clauses are marked as patient trigger, but because of zero anaphora there is no actual trigger NP within the clauses themselves — the trigger NP for both of these predicates is rakyat itu ‘the common people’ from IU 1223. The third bahwa clause spans IU 1228–1229. Again, there is no overt verb immediately preceding it, but through parallelism in the discourse context it appears to still be part of the frame introduced by menganggap ‘assume’ in IU 1221. The remaining IUs contain three more clauses, still part of the assumption, but not introduced by bahwa. Thus two of the three bahwa clauses in this example are noncontiguous with the verb menanggap ‘assume’, but because these are part of the frame introduced by the verb, I have coded them as co-occurring with this verb. Because of parallelism and the availability of this verb in the discourse context, it seems reasonable to consider them as being instances of bahwa clauses based on verbal predicates. The second type of noncontiguity is illustrated by (5) below. In this example, bahwa introduces an increment, after a clause which is both syntactically and prosodically complete. (5) (“Muram” IU 60–70) 60 Kayaknya belum muncul, seem-nya not.yet appear 61 tapi yang jelas dia ngomong gini. but rel clear 3sg at-talk like.this 62 Bahwa, bahwa 63 .. selama ini, as.long this
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64
dia, 3sg 65 … e=, um 66 banyak ngobrol sama anak-anak Korkomik dari ISI itu, much at-chat with child.redup Korkomik from ISI that 67 .. dan= apa namanya? and what name-nya 68 Saat ini, moment this 69 salah satu anggota mereka kan, one.of one member 3pl prt 70 sedang bikin pameran kamar itu. prog make exhibit room that “It seems that he hasn’t shown up yet. But the important thing is, he said that so far, he’s talked a lot with the folks from Korkomik (a student group) at ISI (a local, very famous art institute) and, what’s it called? Right now, one of their members is having an art exhibit.”
The verb ngomong ‘talk’ in IU 61 frames the remaining discourse as reported speech, introducing a series of clauses extending through IU 70. The clause in IU 61 is itself both prosodically and syntactically complete. Prosodically, IU 61 ends with a final intonation contour. Syntactically, this IU is also a complete sentence, consisting of a cleft construction. The subject NP (a headless relative) yang jelas ‘that which is clear’ precedes the predicative clause dia ngomong gini ‘he spoke thus’. The adverbial form gini ‘thus; in this manner’ functions cataphorically in this context to project the upcoming reported speech. IU 62 consists solely of bahwa, followed by continuing intonation. Bahwa in this example does not appear to introduce a single clause per se, but rather an entire stretch of reported speech. As with the discussion in 2.3.1 in the previous chapter, these increments are noncontiguous with the verb in the previous IU, separated from it by both prosodic and syntactic completeness. I have nonetheless coded such examples as a verbal predicate co-occurring with bahwa, since the verb is nearby, and the material introduced by bahwa is within the frame evoked by that verb — in this case an explication of what had been said. The third type of verbal noncontiguity is illustrated in (6). In this example, an entire clause separates the framing verb from the instantiating clause introduced by bahwa.
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(6) (“Muram” IU 1105–1108) 1105 Baba bilang, Baba say 1106 itu sama, that.dem same 1107 gitu lho. thus prt 1108 Bahwa memang Baba sendiri mengakui itu muram gitu lho. bahwa indeed Baba self at-admit-app that.dem gloomy thus prt “Baba says it’s the same, like. That indeed Baba himself admits it’s gloomy, like.”
The verb bilang ‘say’ in IU 1105 is followed by a juxtaposed clause of reported speech (not introduced by bahwa) in IU 1106. IU 1107 contains the frequent collocation gitu lho, which is a particle often appearing in or around reported speech, which, according to the Indonesian consultants, perhaps functions similarly to the English discourse marker ‘like’. IU 1108 contains an assertion in two clauses introduced by bahwa: memang Baba sendiri mengakui ‘indeed Baba himself admits’ and itu muram ‘it’s gloomy’. Because this construction is still reporting Baba’s words/feelings, and is thus part of the evidential frame introduced by bilang ‘say’, I have coded it as co-occurring with this verb, despite the presence of an intervening clause. In this section I have demonstrated that not all of the 29 instances of bahwa after a verbal predicate are actually contiguous with that verb. 9 out of the 29 examples in the data are noncontiguous. Some are noncontiguous but parallel, others are increments on the clause containing the verb, and a third group are separated from the verb by an entire clause. Because all of these clauses are part of the scene or evidential frame evoked by the verb, they have been coded as cooccurring with that framing verb, despite their noncontiguity. With respect to grammatical complementation, these instances of noncontiguity suggest that the bahwa clauses in these particular examples — nearly one-third of the bahwa clauses which co-occur with verbs — are not grammatical core arguments of the framing verb. In the next section we will take an in-depth look at the kinds of verbal predicates which frame bahwa clauses.
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3.3.2 Verbs preceding bahwa As discussed in Table 3 on page 100, there are 29 instances in the data of the construction we have been investigating — a bahwa clause following a verbal predicate. This section examines the verb forms which precede bahwa in these constructions. Table 4 lists the number of tokens of each verb form preceding bahwa. Note that because of syntactic noncontiguity as discussed in 3.3.1, the total number of verb tokens is actually only 24 (not 29), since a single verb may precede more than one bahwa clause. In (4), for instance, the verb menganggap ‘assume’ frames three bahwa clauses; since this verb form only occurs once, it only counts as one token in the following table. Table 4.Comprehensive list of verbs preceding bahwa Verb
Gloss
bilang ng-omong di-omong-kan tahu benar meng-anggap mem-bayang-kan dengar ingat di-jelas-kan kata-kan lihat ber-pandang-an percaya di-sebut-kan men-(t)erima
say at-talk pt-talk-app know true at-opinion (assume) at-imagine-app hear remember pt-clear-app (clarify) word-app (say) see mid-view (have the opinion) believe pt-mention-app at-receive (accept/comprehend)
Tokens 4 3 1 3 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
This table lists all verbs in the corpus which precede bahwa, alphabetically by stem, with the more frequent verbs first. Only four verbs in the database occur more than once with bahwa: four tokens of bilang ‘say’, three tokens of ngomong ‘talk’ (plus one instance of the patient-trigger form of this stem diomongkan), three instances of tahu ‘know’, and two tokens of benar ‘true’. The remaining 11 verb stems only precede bahwa on one occasion in these two transcripts. There are at least three issues which this table calls to mind, to which I will devote the next three subsections: verb semantics, collocations, and verbal morphology.
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3.3.2.1Co-occurrence restrictions The first question I wish to address about the table presented above is whether there are any unifying characteristics common to the framing verbs listed here. I.e. does the data support the exclusive co-occurrence of bahwa with a particular class of verbs, or does bahwa appear freely with all verbal predicates? The data presented in Table 4 suggest that there are in fact fairly specific semantic characteristics of the types of verbs in these constructions. With the exception of benar ‘true’, to which we will return shortly, fourteen of the fifteen verb stems in the table are Perception-Cognition-Utterance (PCU) verbs par excellence: “a verb of perception, cognition, mental attitude or verbal utterance” (Givón 1990: 518). Thus all the bahwa clauses which co-occur with verbal predicates in the data co-occur with verbs referring to activities such as speaking, listening, seeing, remembering, and the like. Conversely, the bahwa clauses themselves serve a reporting function: they are projections of the material framed by the preceding PCU verb. In this sense, semantically at least, the bahwa clause behaves like a canonical sentential complement with these kinds of verbs: “The complement clause codes a proposition that in turn represents a state or event that is the object of the mental or verbal activity coded by the main verb” (Givón 1990: 518). Following this line of argumentation then, bahwa can be interpreted as a complementizer, linking a CTP to a complement clause. PCU verbs are at the lower end of Givón’s binding hierarchy, having complement clauses not tightly integrated with the CTP. According to Givón, complementizers often occur in this context, to signal that the CTP is not tightly integrated with the complement clause. Thus with these verbs, semantically at least, bahwa can be interpreted as a complementizer, linking a CTP to a complement clause. Whether this is actually the most preferable analysis of bahwa is an issue to which I will return later. The one form in Table 4 which is not a PCU verb is the epistemic framingverb benar ‘true’. The following two examples contain both of the tokens of this verb, and the three bahwa clauses associated with them. The framed clauses are all “facts” (in terms of the projection with this name as defined by Halliday), and the verb benar ‘true’ asserts the speaker’s attitude towards these facts. (7) (“Muram” IU 547–555) 547 .. Benar, true 548 bahwa mungkin realitasnya muram gitu. bahwa possible reality-nya gloomy thus
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549
Atau, or 550 bahwa realitasnya, bahwa reality-nya 551 … semacam, a.kind 552 semacam inilah ya? a.kind this-prt prt 553 Nggak tahu, neg know 554 itu interpretasi masing-masing orang tapi, that interpretation each-each person but 555 … apakah tidak ada cara lain misalnya. q neg exist way different example-nya “It’s true that maybe reality is gloomy. Or that reality is a kind of, is a kind of like how it is now, I don’t know, it’s an individual interpretation but, aren’t there maybe other ways?” (8) (“Muram” IU 1471–1476) 1471 … Yo mungkin benar, yes possible true 1472 bahwa setiap orang juga merasakan, bahwa every person also at-feel-app 1473 tapi persoalannya kan, but issue-nya prt 1474 seperti juga, like also 1475 … e=, um 1476 … demonstran gitu ya. protestor thus prt “Yeah, it might be true that everyone feels it too. But the problem is, like with protestors, like.”
The first IU in (7) contains the word benar ‘true’. IU 548 consists of bahwa followed by a proposition which the speaker is characterizing as being true: ‘maybe reality is gloomy’. IU 549 contains the conjunction atau ‘or’, and bahwa in IU 550 introduces another proposition (marked by much hesitation, disfluency and word-search) which the speaker is also characterizing as true: (roughly paraphrasing), reality is an individual, subjective experience. In (8),
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the first IU contains benar ‘true’, and IU 1472 contains the material the speaker is framing as true: ‘every person also feels [it]’. (The zero anaphora in this IU refers to the topic of this section of the discourse: the problems of humanity, which (in this IU) it is claimed that everyone feels but only some complain about or try to change.) Semantically, these constructions have the characteristics generally associated with “subject complements”: a proposition expressed by a clause, and something predicated (in this case “truth”) about this proposition. However, formally there is no difference between the constructions with benar and the constructions with other verbs. As with the other verbs discussed previously in this section, benar frames the material introduced by bahwa, which serves as a projection. In this sense, there is no difference between bahwa clauses following benar ‘true’ and those following PCU verbs. 3.3.2.2Bahwa as a collocational element? A second question worth investigating has to do with whether the occurrence of bahwa can be predicted based on the preceding verb. In other words, are there verbs which, whenever they occur, are generally followed by bahwa? If this is the case, then sequences like bilang bahwa ‘say that’ should best be understood as a verb collocation or phrasal verb. Such cases would suggest that bahwa does not carry any functional load on its own, but simply is part of larger collocational expressions. The text counts presented below in Table 5 provide strong evidence against such a hypothesis. This table lists the 15 verb stems which occur with bahwa (as presented in Table 4), and also gives the total number of these stems in the two speech events. Since bahwa only occurs in “Muram” and “Tanya-Jawab”, the total verb counts are restricted to these two transcripts as well. This table shows that only 3 of the 31 instances of tahu ‘know’ in these two transcripts precede bahwa, 1 of the 29 instances of lihat ‘see’, 4 of the 26 tokens of bilang ‘say’, and so forth. While the verbs at the bottom of the table are inconclusive since there are so few overall tokens, the overwhelmingly small fraction of these verbs which are actually followed by bahwa suggest that, if they do play a role at all, collocational factors are most certainly not central in these constructions. The main difference between verbs which are followed by bahwa and those which are not, is that the verbs which are not followed by bahwa are also generally not followed by another clause. But there are exceptions to this, as illustrated by the pair in the following example.
Complementizers in context
Table 5.Overall distribution of verbs which sometimes occur with bahwa Stem
Gloss
tahu lihat bilang omong dengar benar kata terima jelas sebut ingat percaya anggap pandang bayang
know see say talk hear true word receive clear mention remember believe opinion view imagine
Tokens with bahwa
Total tokens
3 1 4 4 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
31 29 26 20 19 18 16 16 15 5 5 4 3 3 2
(9) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 651–659) 651 T: sekali lagi saya katakan, one.time again 1sg word-app 652 .. Ada juga perempuan yang lebih kuat dari saya. ex also woman rel more strong from 1sg 653 I: Iya. 654 T: Kemudian yang= kedua, then rel ord-two 655 .. kecenderungan untuk tidak melibatkan emosi. tendency for neg at-involve-app emotion 656 … Saya katakan lagi-lagi secara umum. 1sg word-app again.redup a.way general 657 .. E bahwa laki-laki lebih, um bahwa man more 658 .. lebih tidak gampang terpengaruh pada [.. emosi]. more neg easy nonvol-influence at emotion 659 E: [Emosi]. [emotion “I’ll say it again, there are also women who are stronger than me. And then, the second thing is: the tendency not to involve their emotions. I say this again, in general, that men are more not-easily-influenced by emotions.”
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The verb katakan ‘say’ occurs twice in this example. It occurs in the first IU of the example (not followed by bahwa), and then is followed by a clause in IU 652 which states what it is that the speaker is saying: that there are women who are stronger than he is. Katakan ‘say’ occurs a second time, in IU 656, and is followed by bahwa in IU 657 and then the clause identifying what the speaker wants to assert: that, in general, men are less-easily-influenced by their emotions. In both cases, katakan frames the following clause, which specifies the information the speaker is highlighting. The presence or absence of bahwa appears to have no bearing on the semantics. If verb+bahwa constructions in fact were collocational phrasal verbs, then we could expect a difference in meaning between verbs with bahwa and verbs without. However, pairs in examples such as (9) suggest no obvious semantic differences, making a collocational analysis even less plausible. 3.3.3 Verb morphology As shown in Table 4, there are three instances of patient-trigger, di- prefixed verbs co-occurring with bahwa. All three of these forms also happen to have the applicative suffix -kan. As discussed in 1.2.3.5.1 of the grammar sketch, the diprefix indicates that the P argument of the clause is the grammatical trigger. Similar to the analyses presented in 2.5.2.2.1, instances of bahwa clauses marked as the grammatical trigger would provide compelling evidence that these clauses are indeed core arguments of a predicate. As core arguments, then, such bahwa clauses would meet the morphosyntactic definition of complements. An indepth investigation of these three patient-trigger verbs could provide crucial evidence regarding the status of complementation in Indonesian. Overall, however, the data suggests that the bahwa clauses are not in fact core arguments, and therefore the patient-trigger verbs in these examples do not substantiate morphosyntactic complementation. I will now discuss each of these three examples in turn. (10) (“Muram” IU 111–118) 111 .. Nah=, well 112 tadi yang diomongkan, just rel pt-talk-app 113 … anak psikologi itu, child psychology that.dem
Complementizers in context
114
sama saya, with 1sg 115 gini. like.this 116 Bahwa Garasi itu, bahwa Garasi that.dem 117 pernah ngangkat dari komik ke pa- … ke pentas. ever at-lift from comic to to stage 118 Ke panggung gitu lho. to stage thus prt “What the psychology student was just talking about with me is thus. That Garasi (the name of a theater group) has taken these comics and staged them. Put them on stage.”
This example consists of a headless relative clause (IU 112–115) followed by a clause introduced by bahwa (IU 116–118). The patient-trigger verb diomongkan ‘discuss’ in IU 112 is syntactically the predicate of a headless relative, as it is preceded by the relative-clause marker yang. IU 113 contains the A-argument NP, which is not the grammatical trigger, as shown by the verbal prefix di- in the previous IU. IU 114 contains an oblique NP, and IU 115 consists of the cataphoric adverbial gini ‘like.this’, which (as in the discussion of (5) above) projects upcoming reported speech. This clause is both prosodically and syntactically complete. Prosodically, IU 115 has a final intonation contour. Syntactically, the clause consists of a predicate, an A-argument, and an oblique. The trigger of the clause is the (unexpressed) head of the headless relative — a typical case of Indonesian unexpressed arguments. Patient-trigger clauses commonly have no overt trigger argument, especially since P-arguments in these clauses tend to be definite and identifiable. Thus the bahwa clause introduced in IU 116 is an increment, occurring after a point of syntactic and prosodic completion, and cannot be analyzed as the P-argument trigger NP of the previous clause. However, this example is exactly parallel to those in previous sections in that the framing verb precedes bahwa and the projection. (11) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 611–616) 611 I: Trus yang ingin saya tanyakan itu, then rel want 1sg ask-app that.dem 612 ini kan di=sebutkan, this prt pt-mention-app 613 bahwa melebihkan sebagian mereka, bahwa at-more-app some 3pl
113
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614
yaitu laki-[laki], that.is man 615 T: [N-n]. 616 I: (H) Yang dilebihkan itu sebetulnya apa? rel pt-more-app that.dem actually what “So, what I want to ask about is, it says this here, that more is given to some of them, namely to men. What is it, actually, that they are given more of?”
This excerpt comes from the middle of a rather lengthy discussion of a particular Koran passage. The caller (Iwung) had previously read a passage from the Koran (in Arabic, followed by an Indonesian translation), and is asking specific questions about this verse. There had been a digression as to how a particular word had been rendered in an English translation of the Koran which the caller also owns, and she is now returning to her question. The first IU of the example closes the digression and returns to the question the caller has been wanting to ask the cleric/talkshow host. IU 612 consists of a syntactically-complete clause: a patient-trigger verb disebutkan ‘mention’ preceded by its trigger NP ini ‘this’. (The research assistant had translated this clause into English as “this was mentioned”.) The anaphoric referent of ini ‘this’ is the Koran passage the caller had read earlier. IUs 613–614 consist of a bahwa clause, which is a restatement of the Indonesian translation of this same Koran verse, and the part she wishes to ask about. IU 616 contains Iwung’s question. So, while this example does indeed consist of a patient-trigger verb followed by a bahwa clause, the trigger of this verb is ini ‘this’ in the same IU, not the subsequent clause. This analysis is also consistent with trigger-verb word order, which is the most frequent (but by no means only) order for P-trigger clauses with an overt trigger. The bahwa clause here is not the P-NP trigger (and it certainly is not the A-argument either), and therefore it is not a core argument of the verb. Again, this example parallels those we have seen so far: the verb disebutkan ‘mention’ frames a subsequent bahwa clause. The following example is rather lengthy, and not as clear-cut as the previous two. The relevant bahwa clause begins in IU 563, but the earlier grammatical context is necessary for purposes of this discussion. (12) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 549–570) 549 I: Nah ini kan, well this prt 550 .. sering dipergunakan oleh laki-laki itu, often pt-use-app by man that.dem
Complementizers in context
551 552
T: [@@@] I: [untuk] e=, for um 553 apa namanya? what name-nya 554 T: Mengukuhkan [dominasinya. at-strong-app dominance-nya 555 I: [Ho-o, aff 556 mengukuhkan dirinya bahwa], at-strong-app self-nya bahwa 557 T: Gitu. thus 558 I=][2ya2]. 559 E: [2Mhm2]. 560 I: derajat saya itu lebih [.. tinggi]. rank 1sg that.dem more high 561 T: [Lebih] tinggi= [2gitu2]. more high prt 562 I: [2Padahal2], in.fact 563 di ayat-ayat yang lain kan juga sudah sering dijelaskan, at verse.redup rel different prt also already often pt-clear-app 564 T: [Nhn]. 565 I: [bahwa yang], [bahwa rel 566 (H) derajatnya yang paling tinggi, position-nya rel most high 567 itu adalah laki-laki dan perempuan yang .. [paling ber]ta[2kwa gitu2]. that.dem cop man and woman rel [most mid-piety thus 568 T: [Bertakwa]. mid-piety 569 [2Na=h2]. 570 E: [2Mm=2]. “(I:) Well now, this is often used by men to um, what’s it called? (T:) strengthen their dominance. (I:) Yeah, to strengthen themselves in that ‘my rank is higher’. In fact, in other verses it is made clear that the one
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whose position is the highest is the man and the woman who is the most devout.”
This example is an earlier portion from the same discussion excerpted in (11) between Iwung (a caller) and the talkshow host. The topic at this point in the discussion is how best to translate a particular Arabic word. The talkshow host has suggested that the word is often mistranslated. The excerpt here begins with Iwung claiming that it is the mistranslation of this word which has caused men to believe they have the authority to dominate women and consider themselves of higher status. She goes on to claim that other Koran verses make it clear that one’s status is actually based on one’s religious devotion, and the talkshow host agrees. The example begins with the demonstrative pronoun ini ‘this’ in the first IU. The antecedent for this pronoun is indeterminate, possibly referring to the actual Arabic word, the mistranslation of this word, or the general discourse topic. This kind of referential ambiguity is part of the general indeterminacy characteristic of conversational Indonesian, including unexpressed arguments and non-gender-specific pronouns. Despite its semantic indeterminacy, this demonstrative is unambiguously the P-argument and trigger of the patienttrigger verb dipergunakan ‘utilize’ in IU 550. I note this because it demonstrates that the trigger argument can, and often does, have an indeterminate referent. For our present discussion, the patient-trigger verb of interest occurs in IU 563 with the verb dijelaskan ‘clarify’. This IU begins with an oblique di ayat-ayat yang lain ‘in other verses’, followed by adverbial and aspectual particles, and the patient-trigger verb. The verb is followed by IU 564, which introduces a bahwa clause spanning IU 564–567. There is no overt A-argument to the verb in IU 563, and there is no overt trigger-NP P-argument in this IU either. At this point, the analyst has two options: (i) claim that the P-argument is the bahwa clause introduced in IU 565, or (ii) claim that the P-argument is unexpressed, and actually refers to the same antecedent as does ini ‘this’ in IU 549 — the Arabic word, the mistranslation, the confusion about the mistranslation, or the general discourse topic. According to this second approach, it is this antecedent which is both P-argument and trigger, and is being clarified by the bahwa clause. There are at least two arguments in favor of the second analysis. First, based on the two examples presented earlier in this subsection, there is no strong evidence to support the ability of bahwa clauses to function as trigger arguments. Secondly, the trigger in P-trigger clauses is frequently unexpressed. Especially if the trigger is highly topical, given, or nearby in the discourse, it is often not overtly present in the patient-trigger clause itself, but is inferable from
Complementizers in context
the previous discourse context. Note that the translation of this example is indeterminate in English as well: is ‘it’ a pronoun referring to an antecedent (e.g. the Arabic word, the mistranslation, the confusion, etc.), or is ‘it’ the marker of an extraposed subject? Because of the indeterminate nature of this example, it neither confirms nor disconfirms the question of whether bahwa clauses function as the trigger in patient-trigger clauses in the data. This third example simply does not provide strong evidence either way. In sum, verb morphology in the corpus does not support the analysis of bahwa clauses as morphosyntactic complements — as the clausal P-argument of a patient-trigger verb. Examples (10) and (11) in fact provide strong evidence against such an analysis, and (12) is simply indeterminate. All three examples, however, continue to illustrate the pattern of a verb framing a projection in a clause introduced by bahwa.
3.4 Bahwa after an NP As illustrated in Table 3, there are 17 instances of a bahwa clause co-occurring with an NP. Following are three examples. (13) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 1166–1170) 1166 (H) Para, pl 1167 para suami yang yang punya anggapan, pl husband rel rel possess opinion 1168 bahwa dirinya pemimpin dan berkuasa, bahwa self-nya leader and mid-power 1169 hargailah, price-app-prt 1170 .. suara para wanita gitu lho. voice pl woman thus prt “For husbands who have the opinion that they are the leaders and the ones in charge: like pay attention to the voice of the women!”
In this example, the NP anggapan ‘opinion’ (derived from the verb stem anggap) is followed by a bahwa clause in IU 1168 which states the specific opinion being referred to: that men are the leaders and the ones in charge. The noun anggapan ‘opinion’ is an abstract concept, and the bahwa clause gives a concrete instantiation of it — a specific opinion.
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(14) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 761–764) 761 .. Nah jadi memang secara .. alamiah, prt so indeed a.way natural 762 terdapat kondisi-kondisi tertentu. nonvol-get condition.redup nonvol-certain 763 .. bahwa kalau perempuan hamil itu, bahwa if woman pregnant that.dem 764 .. ya jangan dipaksa ngangkat yang berat-berat. yes don’t pt-force at-lift rel heavy.redup “So it’s a natural way, in certain conditions. That if a woman is pregnant, well don’t force her to lift heavy things.”
In (14), the NP secara alamia ‘naturally; a natural way’ occurs in IU 761. As in the previous example, this NP is an abstraction. IUs 763–764 consist of a bahwa clause which gives a specific, concrete instance of this ‘natural way’. As with examples discussed in 3.3.1, the bahwa clause here is functioning as an increment, since the clause produced in IUs 761–762 is syntactically complete, and also ends with a final intonation contour. (15) (“Muram” IU 1172–1179) 1172 … e=, um 1173 itu mempertahan, that.dem at-endure 1174 c- cerpen-cerpen itu, short.story.redup that.dem 1175 secara tidak langsung, a.way neg direct 1176 mempertahankan, at-endure-app 1177 … ·status quoÒ, ·status quo 1178 bahwa, bahwa 1179 … orang kecil ya memang kayak gitu. person small yes indeed like thus “Um, it maintains… The short stories, indirectly, maintain the status quo that the common people are indeed like that.”
In example (15) the borrowing status quo in IU 1177 is followed by the solitary word bahwa in IU 1178, which precedes a clause in IU 1179. This clause
Complementizers in context
provides a specific instantiation of the status quo the short stories are allegedly maintaining, namely that ‘the common people are indeed like that’. As previously alluded to for framing verbs in the discussion of (5), bahwa can also introduce a stretch of reported speech, consisting of several clauses. The following example is illustrative of this feature of bahwa when framed by an NP as well. Bahwa functions here to introduce a larger unit of discourse — in this case a joke. (16) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 214–219) 214 T: Ya itu itu salah satu ·jokeÒ, prt that.dem that.dem one.of one joke 215 (H) Rasululah yang lain lagi, The.Prophet rel different again 216 yang saya kutip dari pak Quari Shihab [masih], rel 1sg excerpt from father Quari Shihab still 217 E: [Mhm]. 218 T: (H) yaitu bahwa, that.is bahwa 219 .. ada ibu yang berkata, ex mother rel mid-word “Yeah, that’s one of the jokes. The Prophet had yet others that I’m still excerpting from Mr. Quari Shihab. Namely: there was a woman who said…”
In this example, the talkshow host (T) is discussing the Prophet Muhammad’s use of jokes, as described in an article he had previously read by an Islamic leader named Quari Shihab. T had just quoted one of the jokes, which is where this excerpt starts. In this example, the projection introduced by bahwa is framed by the NP lain lagi ‘others’. This NP is general and fairly abstract, and the projection gives a specific concrete example — in this case one of the very jokes T is referring to. The joke begins in IU 219 (the last IU of this excerpt) and continues through IU 245. This example, along with other instances of reported speech such as (5), illustrates that bahwa can introduce units of discourse much larger than individual clauses or even complex sentences. For such examples, an analysis of these stretches of speech as sentential complements is not justified, since the material is much larger in scope than a single clause. In sum, the NPs in these four examples are fairly abstract, and provide a frame for the projection of a specific example or instantiation of this more general, abstract noun. This same pattern holds true for all of the NPs followed by bahwa in the data. Table 6 lists the 14 NPs which make up the 17 NP tokens.
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Table 6.Comprehensive list of NPs preceding bahwa NP
Translation
anggakpan apologi artinya asumsi frame hal hubungannya lain lagi penjelasan persoalan secara alamia sisi pentingnya status quo yang penting
opinion apology meaning assumption frame/context thing connection others clarification issue natural way the important thing status quo that which is important
Tokens 1 1 2 1 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
One surprising finding displayed by this table is the high number of recent foreign borrowings among the NPs which precede bahwa. 4 of the 14 NPs listed in the table are immediately apparent as borrowings: apologi, asumsi, frame, and status quo. All four of these borrowings occur in “Muram” (the student discussion group), while none occur in the “Tanya-Jawab” speech event (the Islamic call-in show). Undoubtedly, such borrowings help to contribute to the “literate” feel of the “Muram” discussion, but there is likely an additional reason why a bahwa clause was used with these foreign terms. As with the other examples, these terms are general and abstract, and the bahwa clause serves to elaborate on them by giving a specific example. Such elaboration may be especially relevant for foreign terms. For example, if the speaker assumes a lack of familiarity with these terms among the other speech participants, the speaker may choose to restate them in Indonesian by means of elaboration and example.
3.5 Unframed bahwa clauses As shown in Table 3, 9 of the 55 tokens of bahwa do not co-occur with verbs or nouns. I have coded such constructions as “unframed”. These bahwa constructions completely defy analysis as complement clauses, since there is no “higher” predicate for them to be a core argument of. Following are three examples.
Complementizers in context
(17) (“Muram” IU 1605–1607) 1605 … Kalau saya= melihat kemuraman, if 1sg at-see gloom 1606 … yang dimunculkan tadi bahwa, rel pt-appear-app just.now bahwa 1607 … ya ini sebuah sebuah proses gitu lho. yes this a.cl a.cl process thus prt “If/whenever I observe the gloom that just came up (i.e. that we were talking about), it’s like, well this is a process, you know.”
(17) begins with a temporal clause as background in IU 1605–1606 (“whenever I observe the gloom we were just discussing”), and the speaker’s reactions to this are given in IU 1607 (“it’s a process”). The speaker then spends the next 70 IUs explaining what this process is: that people get used to gloom and oppression and, after a while, it no longer seems like gloom and oppression but is just a part of everyday life. Bahwa occurs at the end of IU 1606, and seems to introduce the speaker’s thoughts/feelings/reactions in IU 1607. But there is no sign of either a PCU verb or a relevant NP which would warrant the use of bahwa. Instead, bahwa seems to function on its own as an introducer of the reported speech/thought projection in IU 1607. The following example is similar. (18) (“Muram” IU 1568–1573) 1568 Pembicaraannya tidak dalam wilayah itu gitu. discussion-nya neg inside realm that.dem thus 1569 .. Diterima atau tidak diterima, pt-receive or neg pt-receive 1570 Silahkan masing-masing orang. please.go.ahead each.redup person 1571 Sekali lagi, one.time again 1572 bahwa ini, bahwa this 1573 ini ini permainan gitu. this this game thus “The discussion is not in the realm of accepting or not accepting [a certain interpretation], but it’s up to each individual person. Once again, this is a game.”
This excerpt comes from a fairly convoluted and complex philosophical discussion about reality, individual interpretations of reality, opposing views,
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and dialectic. A clause begins with sekali lagi ‘once again’ in IU 1571, and articulates the speaker’s view in IU 1572–3 bahwa ini permainan ‘this is a game’. As with the previous example, there is no verb or NP in the nearby discourse relating to this clause, and bahwa functions on its own to introduce the speaker’s reported thoughts/speech. (19) (“Muram” IU 1484–1489) 1484 .. Mungkin setiap orang juga merasakan ketidakberesan, possible every person also at-feel-app disorder 1485 Tapi bahwa, but bahwa 1486 .. ketika ada seseorang mengatakan itu, if ex a.person at-say-app that.dem 1487 .. maka, therefore 1488 dia akan membentuk sebuah, 3sg will at-shape a.cl 1489 dialektika yang berbeda itu lho. dialectic rel different prt prt “Maybe everyone feels the disorder, but it’s that if there’s someone talking about it, then he will form a different dialectic.”
(19) is an example of the very formal yet incomprehensible speech alluded to in Section 3.2 above. No one, including me or the three research assistants, one of whom was a speech participant, has any idea what the speaker means by this statement. In context, the best approximation of the speaker’s point is: there is disorder; everyone feels the disorder; only some people talk about the disorder; talking about the disorder changes how we feel about it. For the present discussion, however, the relevant feature of this example is the occurrence of bahwa in IU 1485. In IU 1484, the speaker has proposed a point-of-view — “Maybe everyone feels the disorder.” The speaker then presents an opposing point-of-view by beginning the next IU with the conjunction tapi ‘but’, setting up a contrast with the previous clause. Following this is bahwa, and the opposing point-of-view in IU 1486–1489. Again, there is no PCU verb or NP introducing these clauses. Rather, it’s as if the speaker is using bahwa in IU 1485 to report his own point-of-view as his own, in contrast with the position he has presented in IU 1484. In sum, since there is no “higher” predicate or NP present, unframed bahwa clauses can in no way be analyzed as sentential complements. All nine examples
Complementizers in context
of unframed bahwa clauses in the data possess the common element of reporting/representing speech, thoughts, or point-of-view.
3.6 Bahwa as local discourse marker So far in this chapter I have illustrated bahwa as introducing projections. Sometimes these projections occur after a framing verb, sometimes after an abstract noun, and sometimes they occur on their own with no framing material. I have not presented any evidence to suggest that bahwa should be analyzed as a complementizer — a “subordinating morpheme”. In fact, I have shown cases where such an analysis is not plausible: (i) Nearly one-third of the instances of framing-verb projections introduced by bahwa are noncontiguous with their framing verbs, suggesting that they are not core arguments. (ii) Two of the three framing verbs marked with overt patient-trigger morphology definitely do not take the projection clause as a core argument and the third is, at best, indeterminate. (iii) Bahwa sometimes introduces units of discourse larger than a single clause or sentence. (iv) When introducing projections framed by NPs, bahwa is not signaling the role of these projections as a core argument of a “higher” predicate, but rather as a specific and concrete instantiation of a general, abstract NP. (v) 9 of the projections introduced by bahwa are unframed, and thus cannot be core arguments in a larger clause — since there is no larger clause for them to be core arguments of. Rather than analyzing bahwa as a complementizer, in light of the data in the corpus I believe a more realistic account of its function is to analyze bahwa as a discourse marker. It functions to maintain textual coherence by providing an overt connection on a local level of discourse between a projection and its framing element, or to signal the following clause as a projection on its own. This type of coherence-building is exactly what many discourse markers do. A good summary of the general functions of discourse markers is found in Lenk (1998: 52): Since discourse markers are used in a strictly pragmatic manner, they do not contribute anything to the proposition of the utterance in which or next to which they occur. Instead of contributing to the proposition, discourse markers signal the sequential and ideational relationship of the two utterances between which they occur, or to other segments within the discourse. To conclude: discourse markers are short lexical items, used with a pragmatic meaning on a metalingual level of discourse in order to signal for the hearer how the speaker intends the present contribution to be related to preceding
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and/or following parts of the discourse. Depending on this retrospective or prospective orientation, discourse markers indicate how the current contribution is to be understood as relevant in light of the global coherence of the entire discourse. Discourse markers can have either a local or a global orientation in the discourse, expressing a local (between two adjacent utterances) or global (between discourse segments further apart) connection for the hearer. They are thus vitally important for the establishment of an understanding of coherence in conversation. (Lenk 1998: 52)
This summary gives a number of characteristics of discourse markers which are also attributable to bahwa. I will devote the remainder of this section to a discussion of these aspects as cited from Lenk. First, bahwa does “not contribute anything to the proposition of the utterance”. This word has no lexical meaning in Indonesian, nor does it serve any other grammatical function. While etymological references claim its origin from a Sanskrit word meaning ‘essence’ (de Casparis 1997: 11), there is no vestige of any prior lexical meaning for bahwa in present-day Indonesian at all. When I present a pair of sentences to the consultants, one sentence with bahwa and the other without, they claim that there is absolutely no difference in meaning between the two sentences, only that the one with bahwa is “lebih jelas” (‘clearer’). In this sense, bahwa contributes nothing to propositional meaning, but only to the sequential relationship of the projection in the surrounding discourse context. Secondly, bahwa functions both retrospectively and prospectively “in order to signal for the hearer how the speaker intends the present contribution to be related to preceding and/or following parts of the discourse”. Retrospectively, bahwa indicates that the upcoming projection is framed by a prior verb or NP, or, in the cases of unframed projections, that what is coming up is somehow a contrast (generally in terms of point-of-view) to what has come before. Prospectively, bahwa indicates that what is coming up is a projection. This dual orientation (retrospective and prospective) receives further justification from the positional characteristics of bahwa in the IU. Of the 55 instances of bahwa in the data, 25 occur at the beginning of the IU (e.g. example (1)) and 18 occur at the end of an IU (e.g. example (2)). (Of the remaining 12 examples of bahwa, 8 occur as their own IU as in (5), and 4 occur IU-medially as in (3).) Thus prosody supports this idea of bahwa as both forward- and backward-looking. Another way of thinking about prospective discourse markers is as markers of projectability — projecting that the speaker has not finished and there is still more to come interactionally. One interesting occurrence of bahwa as a
Complementizers in context
projectability marker is as a hesitation in the following example. (For the sake of text counts, I counted the repetition of bahwa in this example as only a single occurrence.) (20) (“Muram” IU 1022–1026) 1022 … Nggak bisa kita menutup itu dengan apologi, neg can 1pl at-close that.dem with apology 1023 bahwa, bahwa 1024 … bahwa bahwa bahwa bahwa ini, bahwa bahwa bahwa bahwa this 1025 .. peristiwa individual, event individual 1026 misalnya gitu ya. example-nya thus prt “We can’t just consider it resolved by giving the apology that this is an individual experience, for example.”
In this example, the NP apologi ‘apology’ occurs in IU 1022, followed by bahwa as its own IU in 1023. This occurrence of bahwa is anticipating an upcoming projection of some sort, and the speaker repeats bahwa four times in the subsequent IU, presumably as a hesitation marker while trying to formulate the following clause. In this example, bahwa functions as a hesitation marker, indicating that there is more to come — a prime example of its ability to function prospectively. In terms of Lenk’s distinction between “local” and “global” discourse markers, bahwa functions locally, to overtly indicate a connection between adjacent segments in the discourse. It prospectively signals the imminent occurrence of a projection, and retrospectively can indicate that the prior utterance frames the upcoming projection. To conclude, the evidence from the data suggests that an analysis of bahwa as a complementizer is not warranted; rather, this is a local discourse marker, which, in general, indicates a connection between utterances as frame and projection — or contrasts the projection with the prior discourse in the case of unframed clauses. When viewed in this more general context, one of the functions of bahwa is in fact to indicate a connection between a framing verb and a projection. However, we lack evidence to suggest that this projection is actually a core argument of the framing verb. Adopting an analysis of bahwa as a discourse marker accounts much more comprehensively for its distribution and functions as actually observed in the data.
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3.7 Summary In this chapter I have provided a close analysis of the word bahwa in the colloquial Indonesian corpus. While this word has generally been understood as a complementizer, I suggest that a broader description of it as a discourse marker more accurately accounts for its usage in the data. Rather than following the standard view of bahwa as a complementizer which sometimes “can be omitted” (Sneddon 1996: 292), I suggest that what needs to be accounted for is not the “omission” of this form, but rather the factors which lead to its occurrence. While there are 263 framed instantiations in the database which are juxtaposed clauses with no connective marker at all, there are only 55 instances of clauses connected by bahwa. This chapter has provided a description of its function and distribution. In Section 3.2 I demonstrated that the occurrence of bahwa is dependent on the register of discourse. Bahwa only occurs in the 2 speech events which consist of relatively formal discussion-oriented material, and is categorically absent from the four more interactional, informal conversations. I devoted the remainder of the chapter to characterizing the linguistic context of its occurrence. In Section 3.3 I discussed its function of introducing projections after framing verbs. In Section 3.4 I described its function of introducing projections after NPs, and in 3.5 I discussed the use of bahwa to introduce a projection which is not framed by a verb or NP. In 3.6 I argued for the analysis of bahwa as a local discourse marker. In this and the previous chapter I have discussed forms which have generally been analyzed as sentential complements. I claim that when these forms are examined in actual language-in-use, a very different picture emerges regarding their grammatical status. While they do fulfill the semantic functions generally associated cross-linguistically with complementation, there is little to no evidence that these forms in colloquial Indonesian actually are grammatical complements. In the next chapter I will discuss verbs in series. Traditionally, these would be analyzed as reduced complements, where the first verb takes the second as an argument. However, I will suggest that verbs in series are best analyzed as single clauses with a complex predicate, as there is no evidence to support an analysis of juxtaposed verbs as biclausal complementation structures.
Chapter 4
Verbs in series
4.1 Introduction This book has so far dealt with constructions which have traditionally been understood as ‘S-like’ complements (Noonan 1985). This term refers to cases where the complement (argument of a main clause) is itself a full clause. In ‘S-like’ complements, one or more full clauses are subordinate to a main clause and combine to form a complex sentence. In the previous two chapters, I have argued for an alternative understanding of these structures in colloquial conversational Indonesian. I have suggested that there is no general evidence to consider such clauses to be arguments of a larger grammatical sentence. In Chapter 2, I addressed the issue of juxtaposed clauses, and argued that they are simply clauses in series with no evidence of grammatical subordination. In Chapter 3, I analyzed the word bahwa, and claimed it functions as a general discourse marker to indicate an elaborative relationship between units of discourse. In both chapters, the ‘framing’ relationship, where one clause serves to frame the other in terms of semantic factors like cognition, utterance, perception, and epistemicity, is purely a matter of inference. Interlocutors infer the relationship between these clauses, and there are no overt signals of subordination of any kind. Thus, clauses in series (with or without bahwa) are best understood as just that — clauses in series; two adjacent clauses in colloquial Indonesian are separate and distinct grammatical structures, and do not comprise a single complex sentence consisting of main and complement clauses. Contrasting with ‘S-like’ complements, the present chapter addresses the types of structures which have traditionally been analyzed as ‘reduced’ complements, from which “certain components normally found in main clauses may be absent” (Noonan 1985: 65). These ‘absent’ elements may include core arguments, finite verb morphology, and tense/aspect/mood distinctions usually found in independent main clauses. According to some analyses, the most radically ‘reduced’ complements would simply consist of two juxtaposed verbs. In this chapter, I will specifically address the status of such serial verbs in the
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colloquial Indonesian corpus. Serialization has been cited as one means of forming reduced complements (cf. Noonan 1985) in which one verb serves as a core argument of another adjacent verb. However, there is no evidence in the colloquial Indonesian data to support a biclausal analysis. Instead of one verb being understood as an argument of an adjacent verb, I suggest that this type of serialization construction should in fact be treated as a single, monoclausal structure with a complex predicate. I will begin by defining and illustrating the phenomenon of verb serialization as observed in the Indonesian data. I will show that serialization encompasses a broad range of semantic relationships, and there is no evidence that those serial verbs which would be considered reduced complements in other languages should be considered such in colloquial Indonesian. I will then address the definitional problems associated with ‘reduced complements’, and will question whether it is warranted at all to call serialization a type of complementation. I will conclude by giving evidence to suggest that the varieties of verb serialization in the colloquial Indonesian data are best analyzed as general complex predicates, and not as biclausal ‘reduced’ complements.
4.2 Overview of verb serialization For purposes of this study, I am using the term ‘verb serialization’ in a broad sense, to refer to the occurrence of two (or more) adjacent verbs with no intervening material, which occur in the same Intonation Unit, and which share at least one argument. Following is one example. In this and all subsequent examples, serial verbs are in boldface type. (1) (“Pencuri” IU 3194) Aku juga malas makan. 1sg also lazy eat “I don’t feel like eating either.”
This example contains two immediately adjacent verbs, malas ‘be lazy/not feel like’ and makan ‘eat’. These two verbs are juxtaposed with no intervening material, comprise a single IU, and share an argument — the pronominal S-argument aku ‘I’. These three factors — occurring contiguously, encompassing a single Intonation Unit, and sharing at least one pronominal argument — are the three criteria for verb serialization adopted in the context of this study, and there are approximately 517 examples of serialization in the Indonesian
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corpus. I will briefly address each of these three criteria in the following subsections, and will then take up the role of the trigger argument in serial verb constructions. It is important to point out that these three criteria are simply meant as a characterization of prototypical serial verb constructions in the Indonesian data, and, as with all prototype-based categories, divergence from the prototype is expected. Constructions exist in Indonesian, and in other languages, which many linguists would consider serialization, but which nonetheless deviate from these three criteria. The gradient nature of verb serialization has also been noted by Aikhenvald (1999: 470) who lists five general attributes of serial verbs cross-linguistically, and then comments: “The important point is that no one of these characteristics is defining per se, since exceptions can be found to each of them” (Aikhenvald 1999: 470). 4.2.1 Verb contiguity Following the typology suggested by Durie (1997), this chapter deals specifically with ‘contiguous’ verb serialization, “where any arguments are placed outside the verb string” (Durie 1997: 302). In the Indonesian data, if a series of verbs instead has overt intervening arguments, they are considered separate clauses and have already been addressed as juxtaposed clauses in Chapter 2. Following is one such example, repeated from (13) in Chapter 2: (2) (“Blewah” IU 1202) Lu balik lu ngapain lu taruh sini. 2sg turn.around 2sg at-what-app 2sg put here “You turned around, you did something, and you put it back here!”
For purposes of this study, examples like (2) are considered juxtaposed clauses, since arguments intervene between the verbs. I recognize that these could alternatively be understood as instances of “noncontiguous verb serialization” (Durie 1997), which in some languages is the norm for serial verb constructions, and admittedly the boundary between serial verbs and verbs in juxtaposed clauses is rather fuzzy. But, for the sake of explicitness, and since contiguous verb serialization appears to be the norm for Indonesian, whenever arguments in Indonesian intervene between verbs, I have treated them as separate clauses and have dealt with them in Chapter 2.
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4.2.2 Single intonation unit Intonationally, serial verbs in the corpus occur predominantly within a single IU: “A serial construction has the intonational properties of a monoverbal clause, and not of a sequence of clauses” (Aikhenvald 1999: 470), as in (1) above. If a series of verbs is distributed over multiple Intonation Units in the Indonesian data, I have classified them as juxtaposed clauses. Compare the following two examples. (3) illustrates verb serialization, while (4) contains two juxtaposed clauses. (3) (“Dingdong” IU 57) Mau main di tempat itu, want play at place that “He wants to play (video games) at that place” (4) (“Dingdong” IU 487–488) 487 .. Lu kalau mau, 2sg if want 488 main deh besok deh. play prt tomorrow prt “If you want, just play it (the video game) tomorrow, okay?”
4.2.3 Argument sharing Argument sharing is one of the strongest definitional criteria cited in the serialization literature: “verbs sharing a common actor or object are merely juxtaposed, with no intervening conjunctions” (Foley and Olson 1985: 18). Given the three arguments A (the most agent-like argument of a transitive clause), P (the most patient-like argument of a transitive clause), and S (the single argument of an intransitive clause), there are nine logically possible configurations of these for a serial construction involving two verbs, all but one of which are attested in the data. Table 1 illustrates each of the possible combinations of argument sharing, and (5)–(12) give examples of each. The one configuration which is not attested in the data is where the A-argument of the first verb in the serial construction is then the P-argument of the second. An exploration of the motivations behind this seeming ‘constraint’ would lie outside the scope of the present study, but likely involve a combination of factors related to information flow, as well as the general principle that serial verbs encode a single event. If a shared argument is an A of one verb, and then is the P of the next verb, this situation would tend to be conceptualized as two
Verbs in series
separate events, and would be expressed as two temporally-sequenced clauses. Table 1. Combinations of shared arguments in serial verb constructions Argument of initial verb
Argument of final verb
Example
S S S A A A P P P
S A P S A P S A P
(5) (6) (7) (8) (9) Unattested (10) (11) (12)
This table shows the types of argument sharing found in the Indonesian data. The first column of each row lists the semantic role which the shared argument has with the initial verb in the series, the second column lists the semantic role the shared argument has with the second verb in the series, and the final column lists the example number of a corresponding instance in the database. (5) (“Muram” IU 1033) … kemudian juga berhak berbicara. then also mid-right mid-speak “then (the public) also has the right to speak.”
The shared argument in (5) is unexpressed, and refers to publik ‘the public’ which was mentioned in the IU before this excerpt. It is the S-argument of the intransitive verb berhak ‘have rights’ as well as the S-argument of the intransitive verb berbicara ‘speak’. Note that the ber- prefix indicates these are indeed intransitive verbs. (6) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 179) … Dia malah berhak menerima zakat. 3sg in.fact mid-right at-accept alms “In fact s/he has the right to accept alms.”
Here, the shared argument dia ‘s/he’ is the S-argument of the intransitive verb berhak ‘have rights’, but it is the A-argument of the transitive verb terima ‘accept’. Note again that the ber- prefix marks an intransitive verb, and the meN- prefix indicates the agent-trigger form of a transitive verb.
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(7) (“Dingdong” IU 376) udah nggak enak dilihatnya, already not pleasant pt-see-nya “It’s not pleasant to see.”
The shared argument in (7) is unexpressed, indicating a scene in a television commercial which is the current topic of conversation. It is the S-argument of nggak enak ‘not pleasant’, but it is the P-argument of the verb lihat ‘see’. Enak ‘pleasant’ is an intransitive stative verb, and the di- prefix on transitive lihat ‘see’ marks patient-trigger. (An alternative analysis of this example is also possible, where the S-argument of enak is the experiencer, but this will not be addressed here.) (8) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 818–819) 818 … mencoba berkata, at-try mid-word 819 tentang hal yang saya ketahui, about thing rel 1sg nonvol-know-app “I try to talk about things I understand.”
The shared argument of the serial verbs in IU 818 is an (unexpressed) firstperson pronominal referent. It is the A-argument of the transitive verb coba ‘try’, which is prefixed with the agent-trigger form meN-, and it is the S-argument of the intransitive ber-prefixed verb berkata ‘talk’. (9) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 623–624) 623 saya juga ingin mengemukakan, 1sg also desire at-front-app 624 dominasi perem- laki-laki gimana. dominance trunc man how “If I also desire to put forth male dominance, how would that be?”
The shared argument of the serial verbs in IU 623 is saya ‘I’, which is the A-argument of ingin ‘desire’, and also the A-argument of the agent-trigger prefixed verb formed from muka ‘face/front’, roughly translated as ‘propose/put forth’. (10) (“Wisuda” IU 736) Disuruh pergi Jef. pt-order go Jef “Ask them to leave, Jef!”
In this example, the shared argument is an unexpressed third-person referent (recoverable from the discourse context as an unidentified person Jef was telling
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his interlocutor about, who had stolen his seat on a recent train trip). This shared argument is the P-argument of the transitive verb suruh ‘order’, which is prefixed with the patient-trigger prefix di-, and is also the S-argument of the intransitive verb pergi ‘go’. (11) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 764) .. ya jangan dipaksa ngangkat yang berat-berat. yes don’t pt-force at-lift rel heavy.redup “Don’t force them to lift heavy things.”
Here, the shared argument is unexpressed (recoverable from the discourse context as ‘pregnant women’). It is the P-argument of the di-prefixed verb paksa ‘force’, and is also the A-argument of the meN-prefixed verb angkat ‘lift’. (12) (“Pencuri” IU 1268) Malah dipukul dikeroyok sama temen-temennya itu. in.fact pt-hit pt-gang.up.on by friend.redup-nya that.dem “You’ll get beat up and ganged up on by his friends.”
In this example, both verbs in the series are marked with the P-trigger, prefix di-, and both arguments are shared: the P-argument of both verbs is an unexpressed second-person referent, and the semantic A of both verbs occurs as an oblique. In sum, the preceding table and corresponding examples illustrate the eight attested possibilities for the role of the shared argument with respect to each verb in a series. The astute reader may have noticed that in these examples, the shared argument is also the grammatical trigger of each verb. This is not always the case, however, and the question of whether the shared argument must always be trigger is taken up in the next section. 4.2.4 The role of trigger arguments Because of the pervasiveness of unexpressed arguments in colloquial Indonesian, and because overt trigger morphology is often not present, the trigger is frequently indeterminate (cf. Cumming and Englebretson 1998). Thus, for many examples of serial verbs in the data, it is not possible to discern what the trigger argument of each verb actually is. Furthermore, there are occasional instances of verb serialization in which the shared argument is clearly not the trigger of each verb. The following examples are illustrative.
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(13) (“Pencuri” IU 906) Alamatnya suruh tulis lengkap. address-nya order write complete “They tell us to write our complete address.”
This example illustrates the indeterminacy of arguments and trigger, which is often found in the colloquial Indonesian corpus. The shared argument is an unexpressed first-person plural. This is clearly the A-argument of the second verb tulis ‘write’ — but since this verb is unaffixed, it is not possible to tell whether it is also the trigger. The trigger of this verb is either the unexpressed A-argument (in which case tulis ‘write’ is here an agent-trigger form with no prefix), or the expressed P-argument alamat ‘address’ (in which case tulis ‘write’ is an unaffixed patient-trigger form with an unexpressed proclitic agent kita ‘we’). Similarly, it is not possible to ascertain whether the trigger of the initial verb suruh ‘order’ is the unexpressed shared first-person argument (the orderee), or the unexpressed third-person argument (the order-er). Not only is there no trigger morphology on this verb, but the unaccusative argument-structure of this verb further contributes to the indeterminacy. According to Echols and Shadily (1989: 535), when suruh is unaffixed, the S-argument is the patient (the order-ee), and the verb is best glossed ‘be ordered to’. But when the agent-trigger form is used, the A-argument is the order-er and the P-argument is the order-ee. This is borne out in the corpus, where both intransitive and transitive tokens of suruh are observable, and appear to have the meanings described by Echols and Shadily. In this example, the trigger of suruh ‘order’ could either be the unexpressed shared argument (the order-ee), or it could be the order-er (which is also unexpressed). Therefore, it is not clear that the shared argument here is in fact the trigger of both verbs, since alternative interpretations are possible. As seen in the following example, there are indeed instances of serialization in the data in which the shared argument cannot be understood as the trigger of both verbs. (14) (“Pencuri” IU 2682) (H) ini cepat dibawa pulang, this fast pt-bring go.home “Take this and go home right away.”
In this example, the shared argument is an unexpressed second-person referent — the A-argument of the initial verb bawa ‘bring’, and the S-argument of the final verb pulang ‘go home’ The patient-trigger prefix di- unequivocally marks the initial verb as P-trigger, and thus the shared second-person argument is not
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the trigger here. This example demonstrates that Indonesian serial verb constructions do not require the shared argument to also be trigger of both verbs.
4.3 Types of serial verb constructions So far, this chapter has addressed general characteristics of Indonesian serial verbs. They occur within the same intonation unit, have no intervening material, and share at least one argument, which may or may not be the grammatical trigger of both verbs. From the examples presented thus far, it is clear that they are used to encode a variety of semantic relationships; and, just as with the juxtaposed clauses discussed in Chapter 2, there is no overt conjunction or other morpheme to indicate the relationship between them. This section illustrates various semantic types of serial verbs found in the data. 4.3.1 Serial verbs as putative complements Most of the examples presented so far could, within a traditional complementation framework, be analyzed as a CTP taking a reduced complement. For example, the serial construction malas makan (Lit. ‘lazy eat’) presented in (1) would be analyzed as a CTP malas ‘lazy/not feel like’ taking the verb makan ‘eat’ as an object complement. Following are two more examples. (15) (“Wisuda” IU 966) .. Kapan ni mulai ngepak Gus. when this begin at-pack Gus “When will you start packing, Gus?”
This example again illustrates a serial verb construction — the verbs mulai ‘begin’ and ngepak ‘pack’ are immediately adjacent to each other in the same IU, and the (unexpressed) S argument of each verb is shared — here implying the addressee, who is also evoked by the vocative Gus. A complement analysis of this example would propose that the verb mulai ‘begin’ is the main verb, and that the verb ngepak ‘pack’ is subordinate as a complement. (16) (“Pencuri” IU 1455) aku suruh masuk gitu lho. 1sg order enter thus prt “I was told to go in, like that.”
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(16) contains two juxtaposed verbs, sharing the S argument aku ‘I’: suruh ‘be ordered to’ followed by masuk ‘enter’. An analysis of this clause as a reduced complement would claim the manipulative verb suruh ‘order’ takes the verb masuk ‘enter’ as a complement. Semantically, the verbs in these examples are members of the classes of verbs which lie near the top of Givón’s (1980, 2001b) ‘binding hierarchy’, reflecting closer conceptual integration as a single event: mulai ‘begin’ in (15) is a member of the ‘modality’ subclass of verbs, and suruh ‘be ordered to’ in (16) is a prototypical member of the ‘manipulative’ subclass of verbs. Other examples of serialization in which the initial verb is a member of the modality subclass include: malas ‘lazy/not feel like’ in (1), mau ‘want’ in (3), berhak ‘have rights’ in (5) and (6), mencoba ‘try’ in (8), and ingin ‘desire’ in (9). For the manipulative subclass of verbs, examples in which the initial verb is a member of this class include: suruh ‘order’ in (10) and (13), and paksa ‘force’ in (11). (Additionally, enak ‘be pleasant’ in (7) is an evaluative verb, classifiable as a member of the perception-cognition-utterance subtype, which also is seen as a common cross-linguistic CTP.) Thus, semantically, the initial member of serial verb constructions often is a member of subclasses of verbs which are common sources for Complement-Taking Predicates cross-linguistically — modality and manipulative predicates. And, as noted by Givón, these types of verbs tend to be tightly integrated, reflecting a close conceptual bond between events. The question I wish to raise is: is there any evidence to suggest these Indonesian serial verb constructions are in fact complements? Or, might the conceptual and grammatical link between the two verbs in fact be so tight that they instead form a single, complex predicate of one clause. Before returning to the question of a biclausal (complement) analysis versus a monoclausal (complex predicate) analysis, I wish to briefly illustrate some other types of semantic relationships coded by serial verbs in the data. 4.3.2 Serial verbs with other semantic relationships As with the juxtaposed clauses discussed in Chapter 2, the relationship between serial verbs is inferential, and there tend to be no overt morphosyntactic cues as to how these verbs are related to each other. There is nothing to signal, for instance, that the serial verb constructions in the examples discussed in the previous section have the semantic relationship often associated with complementation in other languages, or that a series of verbs has some other semantic relationship. In other words, the correlation between grammatical form (verb serialization) and
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linguistic function (e.g. complementation) is not one to one. Verb serialization also encodes other relationships, illustrated by the following examples. These include: manner, purpose, causation, and coordinated action. In all of these instances, the relationships between the verbs must be inferred on the basis of verb semantics and context — it is not signaled by grammatical means. (17) (“Pencuri” IU 163) jadi didiantar pake mobil, so trunc pt-deliver use car “So we were brought by car.” (18) (“Pencuri” IU 116) .. Ya ambil ditarik seumanya, prt take pt-pull all-nya “she took everything, pulling it (out of my wallet).”
These two examples illustrate manner serialization, in which the second verb describes the manner in which the action of the first verb took place. In (17), the verb pakai (colloquial pake) ‘use’ provides the instrumental frame for the initial verb antar ‘deliver’ — the action of the initial verb was done ‘using/by means of ’ automobile. This situation appears similar to the widespread phenomenon of some serial verbs grammaticizing into instrumental prepositions (cf. Durie 1988 and works cited therein). In (18), the second verb tarik ‘pull’ provides the manner in which the action in the first verb (ambil ‘take’) was accomplished — in this case, the thief had taken the speaker’s money by pulling it out of her wallet. Following are two examples which may be interpreted either as ‘purpose’ serialization, or simply as a sequence of events. (19) (“Pencuri” IU 920) … Pas kakakku pulang ngambil duit, when sibling-1sg go.home at-take money “When my sister went home to get money…” (20) (“Pencuri” IU 1140) kok malah pindah berdiri di sini, how.come in.fact move mid-stand at here “How come he moved to stand right here?”
These two examples can be interpreted either as instances of ‘purpose’ serialization, and/or as serialization to indicate temporal sequence. An analysis of (19) as ‘purpose’ serialization would claim the initial verb pulang ‘go home’ provides the enablement conditions for the action in the rest of the clause to take place
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— the speaker’s sister goes home in order to get money. This could also be analyzed simply as a series of temporally-sequenced actions, in which case the order of verbs reflects the iconic order of events. Both interpretations are possible, and there are no morphosyntactic, semantic, or contextual factors to suggest that the interlocutors favor one or the other. (20) also can be understood as either a ‘purpose’ serialization or simply as two iconically ordered events — and again, there are no grammatical, contextual, or interactional cues to suggest the interlocutors favor one of these analyses. This excerpt is part of the speaker’s description of an encounter with a pickpocket on a bus. When the speaker moved to another seat, the pickpocket moved after her and stood right next to her. Thus the initial verb pindah ‘move’ provides the enablement conditions to allow the rest of the clause to take place — in order for the pickpocket to stand near the speaker. The following three examples contain serial verbs which indicate causation. (21) (“Blewah” IU 536) Dibikin enak aja sekarang. pt-make pleasant just now “Just make it pleasant now.” (22) (“Pencuri” IU 328) Ari itu padahal baru habis kasih makan mereka. Ari that.dem in.fact just finish give eat 3pl “In fact, I had just fed them.” (Note the speaker’s use of her own name for first-person reference — a frequent means of self-reference in colloquial Indonesian.) (23) (“Pencuri” IU 366) baru gua kasih mati. just 1sg give die “I’ll kill you.”
These three examples illustrate serial verbs forming a periphrastic causative construction. The verb bikin ‘make’ in (21), and the verb kasih ‘give’ in (22)–(23) forms a single complex predicate with the following verb. Note that these types of causative constructions are considered nonstandard, and generally do not occur in formal varieties of Indonesian. One exception to this is the verb beritahu ‘inform’, from the roots beri ‘give’ and tahu ‘know’, which is a lexicalized reflex of this type of ‘give’ causative. The mono-predicative nature of serial causatives often leads to lexicalization as with the standard Indonesian verb beritahu ‘inform’.
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(24) (“Dingdong” IU 261) Asal tendang pukul, merely kick hit “He was just kicking and hitting (for no good reason).” (25) (“Dingdong” IU 712–713) 712 Berdiri kena lagi. mid-stand hit again 713 Berdiri kena lagi. mid-stand hit again “He stands up, gets hit again, stands up, gets hit again.”
Both of these examples come from a description of watching someone playing a video game at the mall. Serial verbs are used here to indicate coordinated actions — both actions are rapid and repetitive, seeming to take place simultaneously. Two more examples of this have already been seen above in (12) where the verbs pukul ‘hit’ and keroyok ‘gang up on’ occur as a series to indicate coordinated action, and in (14), where the verbs bawa ‘bring’ and pulang ‘go home’ are again understood as simultaneous events. In sum, the examples in this section demonstrate the various types of relations which may be encoded in Indonesian serial verb constructions, including manner, purpose, causation, and coordinated action. As with the complement-like constructions in the previous section, the relationship between verbs is strictly inferential, based on verb meaning and context. There are no grammatical indications of how the verbs in the series are interrelated, and nothing to distinguish the examples presented in this section from the examples of putative complements discussed above in 4.3.1. 4.3.3 Serial verbs with overt connectors The previous two subsections have illustrated serial verbs with no overt connectors. In fact, this is one of the definitional criteria of verb serialization: “verbs sharing a common actor or object are merely juxtaposed, with no intervening conjunctions” (Foley and Olson 1985: 18). All of the 517 examples of serialization in the database, including the semantic types discussed in the previous two sections as well as modal auxiliaries, meet these criteria; they are immediately juxtaposed verbs with no connectives. However, in addition to these, there are four examples in the database which do have connectors between the verbs. All four examples are listed below.
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(26) (“Wisuda” IU 777) kapling terus tidur. divide.up then sleep “I divided it up and then slept.”
In this excerpt, the speaker is describing a recent train trip and how he made himself comfortable by claiming some floor space, putting pillows down, and sleeping for the duration of the trip. The conjunction terus ‘and/then’ indicates that the two verbs are sequentially ordered — the speaker divides up his space and then goes to sleep. Unlike in the 517 instances of verb serialization in the database which have no conjunction, the relationship between events in this example is made explicit, and not left to verb semantics, inference, and context. Following are the only three other examples in the database of overt connectives in what would otherwise be serial verb constructions, all using the word untuk — roughly translated by the preposition ‘for’ or the purposive conjunction ‘in order to’. (27) (“Pencuri” IU 2579) Dipaksa untuk ngerubut ke situ to, pt-force purp at-crowd.around to there prt “they force you to join the crowd there.” (28) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 1079) lebih suka untuk mengatakan, more like purp at-word-app “Rather, I like to say…” (29) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 2062) .. apa tidak mempan untuk di=- .. -tembak, what neg vulnerable purp pt- -shoot “You’re, what’s-it, not vulnerable to getting shot.”
All three of these examples contain an initial verb, followed by untuk, followed by a final verb. The initial verbs in these examples are, from a cross-linguistic perspective, prototypical CTPs: paksa ‘force’ in (27) is a manipulative predicate, and suka ‘like’ and mempan ‘vulnerable’ in (28)–(29) are modality predicates. Thus, untuk appears to be indicating a relationship between the manipulative/ modality predicate and the second verb. Generally, as in the 517 examples of serialization in the database, this relationship is not explicitly indicated; note that all three of these verbs occur in other examples without untuk. Compare (29) above, where untuk occurs, with (30) below where it does not.
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(30) (“Pencuri” IU 2358) Nggak mempan kena magik. neg vulnerable affect magic “You’re not vulnerable to being affected by magic.”
These two examples, from different speakers in separate speech events, are similar in meaning. In (29), the speaker is discussing a magical charm, which allegedly makes a person impervious to bullets: tidak mempan untuk ditembak ‘not vulnerable for getting shot’. In (30), the speaker has been discussing precautions that a person needs to take in order to not become a victim of black magic, which she claims many thieves use in the market in order to steal money: nggak mempan kena magik ‘not vulnerable to be affected by magic’. Given the similar meanings of these two examples, the function of untuk is not transparent. There are additional examples in the database of paksa ‘force’ and suka ‘like’, which, contrasting with (27)–(28) above, are not followed by untuk. With only three examples of untuk, compared with 517 serial verbs in the database with no connective, it is not possible to determine the factors which lead to the presence of this morpheme. A larger corpus would be necessary, as well as an in-depth analysis of discourse factors (such as Thompson and Mulac 1991a for the presence or absence of ‘that’ in English). So, while untuk does potentially indicate some sort of relationship between a series of verbs, how to characterize that relationship is not clear — it could be that these three examples suggest the grammaticization of a complementizer, or it could be that untuk here is simply functioning to explicitly mark elaboration, or some other factors may be at work not discernable from the three attested examples. In any case, a close analysis of this morpheme in naturally-occurring discourse would be essential to understand its use here. Such an analysis lies outside the scope of this work, but a few observations are in order. There are 66 tokens of untuk in the database, only three of which function to link a series of verbs as in (27)–(29). The remaining 63 tokens have various functions, including as a benefactive preposition (as in (31) below), as a preposition indicating purpose (cf. (32) below), or appositively after a noun to indicate its purpose (cf. (33)–(35)). (31) (“Wisuda” IU 546) .. undangan untuk orang tua, invitation for person old “invitations for your parents”
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(32) (“Pencuri” IU 3902) Yang seribu kan untuk ongkos becak. rel one-thousand prt for fare pedicab “The 1,000 (Rupiah) is for pedicab fare.” (33) (“Pencuri” IU 2397) aku nggak .. nggak pegang sama sekali duit untuk beli. 1sg neg neg hold at_all money purp buy “I didn’t have any money at all (at hand) for buying.” (34) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 655) .. kecenderungan untuk tidak melibatkan emosi. tendency purp neg at-involve-app emotion “a tendency for not involving their emotions.” (35) (“Blewah” IU 657–658) 657 itu masa bakti dua tahun itu, that.dem time service two year that.dem 658 untuk mendapatkan ijin praktek. purp at-get-app permission practice “That’s a two-year internship in order to get permission to practice (medicine).”
In sum, this section has presented the four examples in the database which have an overt connector between what would otherwise be considered serial verbs. Three of these involve the morpheme untuk, which appears to link a manipulative or modality verb with another verb. Out of 66 tokens of untuk in the corpus, only these three have this function in serial verb constructions, while the remainder serve as prepositions or purposive conjunctions. While the presence of these three examples could suggest the nascent grammaticization of untuk as a complementizer, it is still so rare in the data that there is insufficient evidence either way; it could simply be suggesting some sort of elaborative link between the two verbs. There is still no reason to assume that the second verb in the series is in fact subordinate to, or an argument of, the first. The 517 cases of Indonesian verb serialization provide no overt connective marker of any kind, in contrast with the 4 which do. If grammar is understood, as I believe it must be, as emerging from frequency and use (cf. Bybee and Hopper 2001, inter alia), then the overwhelming statistical regularity in Indonesian grammar is to have serial verbs with no overt connective. The four examples presented in this section must be understood as the exception, not the norm.
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4.3.4 Serial verbs as auxiliaries Another facet of serial verbs in the Indonesian data is the apparent grammaticization of some of them into auxiliaries marking aspect and modality. Aspectual and negative auxiliaries were briefly discussed in the grammar sketch in Section 1.2.3.1. In that section, I illustrated the use of the temporal auxiliaries sudah (colloquially udah) ‘already’ to mark perfective aspect, belum ‘not yet’ for an event which has not happened yet but may take place in the future, lagi ‘again’ to mark progressive aspect, mau ‘want’ for future, desire, intent, or expectation, and I gave an example of the auxiliary tidak for predicate negation. Many of these auxiliaries also function as adverbs; however, mau ‘want’, in addition to its function as a temporal auxiliary, also occurs both as a main verb, and as the initial member of a serial verb construction. Other morphemes which also tend to be analyzed as modal auxiliaries include bisa ‘can’, boleh ‘may’, harus ‘have to’, and perlu ‘need’. The grammaticization from modal verbs to auxiliaries is a well-attested cross-linguistic phenomenon (cf. Bybee et al. 1994), and presumably this has taken place in Indonesian as well. A complete discussion of this would necessitate a thorough study of diachronic data, which unfortunately lies outside the scope of the present work. However, two pairs of examples are illustrative. Verbs which Bybee et al. characterize as ‘agentoriented modality’, which “report the existence of internal and external conditions on an agent with respect to the completion of the action expressed in the main predicate” (Bybee et al. 1994: 177) often grammaticize to nonagent-oriented auxiliaries. For instance, ‘desire’ often grammaticizes to ‘future’, and ‘ability’ often grammaticizes to ‘root possibility’. The following two pairs of examples illustrate the synchronic presence of these two apparent grammaticization pathways in colloquial Indonesian. (36) (“Dingdong” IU 1145) .. Dia mau beli Discman. 3sg want buy Discman “He wanted to buy a Discman” (portable CD player). (37) (“Pencuri” IU 1176) .. Mau ada manten, want ex wedding.party “There was going to be a wedding.”
(36) exemplifies the use of mau ‘want’ as an agent-oriented modal verb in a serial construction. The verb expresses the desire of the agent to carry out the
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action in the rest of the clause. The shared argument of the serial construction is the S-argument of mau ‘want’ and the A-argument of beli ‘buy’. In (37), on the other hand, mau occurs purely as a temporal auxiliary marking ‘future’. Since this is a presentative clause with no agent, it does not and cannot express agent-oriented modality, but functions solely as a temporal auxiliary in the predicate with no relation to the nominal argument of the clause. Here we see evidence of grammaticization from an agent-oriented modal verb expressing desire, to a temporal auxiliary expressing future. We also see this word becoming more integrated in the predicate: from the initial member of a serial construction sharing an argument with the following verb, to an auxiliary fully integrated into the predicate as a TAM marker which does not take a nominal argument. The following pair of examples is similar. (38) (“Pencuri” IU 994) intinya dia malam itu nggak bisa nemui saudaranya itu. gist-nya 3sg night that neg can at-meet-app sibling-nya that.dem “The gist of it was that he couldn’t meet his brother that night.” (39) (“Pencuri” IU 1225–1227) 1225 Tebel jadi agak susah, thick so quite difficult 1226 harus mbukak semua, have.to at-open all 1227 baru bisa diambil gitu lho. just can pt-take like.that prt “It (the wallet) was thick, so it was difficult. You had to open it (the bag) all the way, before it (the wallet) could be taken out.”
(38) illustrates the agent-oriented modal verb bisa ‘can’ used in a serial construction to express ‘ability’. The third-person agent of the clause is described as not having the ability to carry out the action of the rest of the clause. In (39), on the other hand, bisa ‘can’ appears to indicate ‘root possibility’. As shown by the di- prefix, the trigger of the clause is the patient — the unexpressed argument ‘wallet’ inferable from the prior discourse. The auxiliary bisa seems to refer primarily to the overall ‘possibility’ of this action taking place, as an auxiliary affecting the general modality of the predicate. Of course, ‘root possibility’ still implies the ability of an unexpressed agent, and for this reason I would claim this example actually is somewhat indeterminate, illustrating both senses of this morpheme. In sum, these two pairs of examples illustrate interesting differences
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between a modal verb as the first element of a serial construction, and this same form used as an auxiliary. When used as a serial verb, the modal shares an argument with the following verb, but when used as an auxiliary it does not. This suggests that what began as an initial serial verb has grammaticized in some cases to an auxiliary, and now occurs only as a marker of aspect or modality in the predicate, with no relation to the arguments of the clause. The point of this discussion, however, is not to provide a clear-cut means of differentiating serial verbs from auxiliaries. Auxiliary meanings have not replaced agent-oriented modals, but rather both meanings now exist synchronically. Because of this polysemy, there are many examples in the database which are indeterminate between a serial modal construction and an auxiliary. And, as previously emphasized, an attempt to fully trace and explicate the grammaticization of these forms must analyze diachronic data, which this study does not attempt. Despite some synchronic differences (namely argument sharing), serial verbs and auxiliaries are formally quite similar: they are contiguous with another verb, have no intervening material, and occur in the same IU. These similarities are undoubtedly one of the reasons they tend to grammaticize in this way. Auxiliary constructions are clearly monoclausal, and, as such, they provide a key piece of evidence suggesting that serial verb constructions are likewise best analyzed as monoclausal structures. This evidence concerns the use of proclitic agents in certain types of patient-trigger clauses. The formation of patient-trigger clauses with an overt proclitic agent has not previously been addressed in this book, as it is fairly complex and covered in detail in grammars of standard Indonesian (cf. Alwi et al. 1993, Chaer 1988, Sneddon 1996, Wolff 1986). Descriptive grammars differ as to what factors condition the occurrence of this type of patient-trigger clause, but it is generally described as applying to non-third-person agents, including kinship terms used as forms of address, and pronominal agents regardless of whether they are third-person (cf. Sneddon 1996: 248–250). To summarize briefly, in clauses containing an auxiliary, the overt agent pronoun procliticizes to the main verb, and this is the only instance in Indonesian in which an auxiliary is not contiguous with the following verb. These types of patient-trigger clauses are relatively rare in conversational discourse, but the following is one such example. (40) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 1066) itu hal yang paling sebenarnya tidak saya sukai, that.dem thing rel most actually neg 1sg like-app “That’s the thing that I actually dislike the most.” (Lit. “that’s the thing which is most disliked by me.”)
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The relative clause in this example is patient-trigger, and the overt agent is the firstperson singular pronoun saya. Because this is a patient-trigger clause with an overt pronominal agent, the pronoun saya occurs after the negative auxiliary tidak and before the verb suka ‘like’. Thus the auxiliary + verb structure is separated by the overt pronominal agent. This is the standard way of coding patient-trigger diathesis in these types of clauses, and is the primary grammatical signal to indicate a monoclausal patient-trigger construction with an auxiliary. This same pattern also holds for modal serial verbs, as in the following example. (41) (“Blewah” IU 17–18) 17 … Masih ada, still ex 18 hal yang perlu kita lakukan lagi. thing rel need 1pl do-app yet “There are still things we need to do yet.” (Lit. “There are still things that need to be done by us yet.”)
Again, the relative clause here is patient-trigger, and the overt pronominal agent kita ‘we’ intervenes between the modal perlu ‘need’ and the verb lakukan ‘do’. Note also that perlu ‘need’ is another example of a verb which is either an agentoriented modal verb of ‘necessity’ in a serial construction, or a modal auxiliary expressing ‘root necessity’ of the predicate. Due to polysemy, this example could be interpreted either way. The important point here is that the occurrence of an overt pronoun between the two verbs marks it formally as a single clause with patient-trigger diathesis. The following example demonstrates that this type of patient-trigger construction also holds for some verbs of cognition. (42) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 857) hal yang mungkin lupa saya katakan, thing rel maybe forget 1sg word-app “The thing that I maybe forgot to say (is…” (Lit. “The thing that maybe was forgotten by me to say is…”)
In this relative clause, the 1sg pronominal agent saya intervenes between the cognition-verb lupa ‘forget’ and the verb katakan ‘say’. As in the previous two examples, this formally indicates a patient-trigger clause. Unlike the previous two examples, however, the initial element of the predicate is neither an auxiliary nor a modal, but is a verb of cognition in a serial verb construction. The fact that the patient-trigger form of this clause is formally identical with the patient-trigger form of auxiliary clauses is one piece of evidence to suggest that,
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like clauses with auxiliaries, this serial verb construction is also monoclausal. Rather than being analyzed as a biclausal complement consisting of a CTP lupa ‘forget’ and a main verb katakan ‘say’, I propose that the formal evidence from this patient-trigger clause suggests that, like clauses containing auxiliaries, it should be analyzed as a monoclausal structure with a complex predicate.
4.4 Implications and discussion This chapter has thus far presented a general discussion of Indonesian serialization. I have shown that serial verbs encode a range of semantic functions, including those which could traditionally be called reduced complements. There is no morphosyntactic or prosodic difference between these and other types of Indonesian serial verbs, which leads to the question of how exactly one can justify serialization as a type of reduced complement. What evidence is there to conclude that these are in fact complements — biclausal structures in which the initial verb takes the final verb as a clausal argument? Or, alternatively, what evidence is there to suggest that these are best understood as monoclausal structures — two verbs comprising a single complex predicate? Other than argumentation based on verb semantics and cross-linguistic trends, there is no clear evidence to support the former position. For this reason, I believe it is unwarranted to simply assume these constructions are complements. The evidence for the latter position, which I will summarize below in 4.4.2, suggests that there are indeed compelling reasons for considering these to be monoclausal. Based on this evidence, and the lack of any good reason to the contrary, I believe it is not justifiable to simply assume these constructions to be complements. Before proceeding to a discussion of the specific evidence in favor of a monoclausal analysis, I will address general concerns about the structural status of serial verb constructions and their relationship to complementation. 4.4.1 The structural status of serialization A major assumption that underlies much research on complementation is that verb serialization is, intrinsically, a structural reflection of reduced complements. In this view, if the initial verb in a series of two verbs is of a particular semantic subtype, then the second verb in the series is an argument (i.e. an object complement) of that verb. This is made explicit by Noonan (1985), who lists verb serialization as a means of forming reduced complements.
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This also appears to be the view of Givón (2001b) for whom “co-lexicalization” is one of the four “syntactic coding devices” for complementation. As defined by Givón, co-lexicalization refers to “attaching the two verbs together — main and complement — to form a single phonological word” (Givón 2001b: 59). What is meant by “phonological word” is not further clarified, but from the examples presented (e.g. “Mary let-go of John’s arm” (Givón 2001b: 60)), it is apparent that the term co-lexicalization is also appropriate for the constructions I am calling serial verbs in the Indonesian data: the two verbs are adjacent, and they are neither separated by an intonation break, nor interrupted by other lexical material. Givón (2001b: 59) gives the term ‘predicate-raising’ as a synonym for co-lexicalization, which is consistent with the analysis of these constructions as biclausal structures: the predicate of the second clause is ‘raised’ into the first, and, as explicitly stated in the definition cited above, these verbs are considered “main” and “complement”. But in fact, many linguists do not consider this type of serialization to be a biclausal structure consisting of main and complement verbs. Foley and Olson (1985) propose a monoclausal analysis, in which serial verb constructions “are tightly knit grammatical structures of a special type, constituting a particular grammatical unit, and not simply two clauses joined together to which obligatory rules of deletion have applied” (Foley and Olson 1985: 26–27). After presenting evidence that serial verbs should not be analyzed as a series of coordinated clauses, they further argue that structures which have traditionally been identified as ‘clause union’ and predicate raising are also more accurately analyzed as serialization — monoclausal structures consisting of two predicates with nuclear or core junctures. While Foley and Olson’s analysis centers on the idea that a single clause may consist of more than one predicate, other recent research in ‘complex predicates’ has demonstrated that a predicate itself may actually consist of more than one verb. Broadly defined, complex predicates are “predicates which are multi-headed; they are composed of more than one grammatical element … each of which contributes part of the information ordinarily associated with a head” (Alsina et al. 1997: 1). Thus, serialization is a prototypical complex predicate structure, in which the verb series serves as the predicate in a single clause. For Aikhenvald (1999: 470), “A serial construction is defined as a sequence of several verbs which act together as a single predicate.” (Note, however, that although this definition of serialization would be considered a ‘complex predicate’ for contributors to Alsina et al. (1997), Aikhenvald uses the term ‘complex predicate’ somewhat differently. For Aikhenvald, one of the
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verbs in a complex predicate must not be able to be used independently, whereas the papers in Alsina et al. do not observe this restriction.) According to this analysis then, rather than being biclausal structures consisting of a main and complement verb, the kinds of serial constructions discussed in the present chapter would instead be understood as complex predicates: “Other researchers … take it that complex predicates may be formed by syntactically independent elements whose argument structures are brought together by a predicate composition mechanism that differs from the usual types of complementation. …The resulting composite argument structure then shows some of the behavior of a simplex predicate, and can be contrasted with a biclausal complementation structure” (Alsina et al. 1997: 1–2). Thus, for these researchers, serialization contrasts with complementation, in that serialization is a monoclausal construction with a complex predicate, whereas complementation is biclausal. Similarly, Aikhenvald (1999: 479) distinguishes serialization from complementation, claiming that complementation shows signs of subordination, while serialization does not. Two of the subtypes of serial constructions discussed by Aikhenvald (1999: 480) include “modal serial constructions [which] contain a modal verb (‘want’, ‘intend to’, etc.) as a first component” and “Causative serial constructions … formed with a verb of causation.” These subtypes of serial constructions in Aikhenvald’s data from Tariana are virtually identical to the Indonesian constructions discussed in the present chapter, in the sense that the first verb is a verb of modality or manipulation, and the second verb follows immediately with no signs of subordination. Taken together, the findings of general work on serialization (such as Foley and Olson 1985), research on complex predicates (papers in Alsina et al. 1997), and language-specific work on serialization (such as Aikhenvald 1999) call into question the claims that serial or ‘co-lexicalized’ verbs should be analyzed as biclausal complementation structures. At the very least, given that there are alternative views on this topic, complementation as such would need to be argued for on a language-specific basis, and not simply assumed from the juxtaposition of two verbs. 4.4.2 Evidence from prosody and grammar The evidence in favor of a monoclausal analysis of the Indonesian serial verb constructions discussed in this chapter centers around their prosodic and grammatical similarity to clauses with only one verb. Prosodically, a clause with serial verbs occurs in a single Intonation Unit, as does the prototypical mono-
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verbal clause. The series of verbs is unitary, coding a single event, just as the single verb in a monoverbal clause, and is not separated by lexical material or a break in prosody. Grammatically, serial verbs have only one set of core arguments, as does the single verb in a monoverbal clause. And, evidence from patient-trigger clauses with overt pronominal agents suggests that these comprise a single complex predicate, formally similar to auxiliary + verb constructions.
4.5 Summary This chapter has addressed verb serialization in the colloquial Indonesian data. Formally, Indonesian serial verbs occur contiguously with no intervening material, fall under a single intonation contour, and share at least one argument. A variety of semantic relationships hold between serial verbs, and thus the juxtaposition of two verbs is not, in and of itself, isomorphic with a specific grammatical function. Many of the instances of serial verbs in the data are semantically quite similar to complements in other languages, as the initial verb in the series tends to be a verb of modality or manipulation. However, I suggest it is unwarranted to assume, simply based on this semantic evidence, that these Indonesian serial verbs are complements. Besides the semantic similarity with structures which are complements in other languages, there is no evidence in Indonesian to support the view that the second verb is an argument of the first. There is, however, prosodic and grammatical evidence to suggest that the two verbs form a complex predicate within a single clause. Thus, I suggest that a serial verb construction is best analyzed as a single clause with a complex predicate, and not as a biclausal ‘reduced complement’ structure. This chapter once again underscores the principle that grammatical categories such as complementation need to be argued for, not assumed. The justification of grammatical categories such as complementation need to be approached on a language specific basis, and not simply inferred from semantic similarity and cross-linguistic trends. In this and the previous two chapters, I have discussed forms which have traditionally been analyzed as complements — sentential complements in Chapters 2–3, and reduce complements in the present chapter. I claim that when these forms are examined in actual language-in-use, a very different picture emerges regarding their grammatical status. While they do fulfill the semantic functions generally associated cross-linguistically with complementation,
Verbs in series
there is little to no evidence that these forms in colloquial Indonesian actually are grammatical complements. In the next chapter I will discuss a construction which has never been analyzed as grammatical complementation in Indonesian, yet which in fact fulfills a range of similar semantic and pragmatic functions.
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Chapter 5
Epistemic -nya constructions
5.1 Introduction In the previous chapters I have analyzed constructions in colloquial conversational Indonesian, which have traditionally been considered to be complementation. Chapter 2 addressed juxtaposed clauses with no overt connective marking, Chapter 3 dealt with material introduced by bahwa, and Chapter 4 examined serial verbs. I argued that the evidence does not support the claim that these constructions are in fact grammatical complements — defined as clauses functioning as the grammatical subject or object of another clause. These constructions do, however, possess semantic characteristics generally associated with complements cross-linguistically: one clause serves as a semantic frame for the other, and the verb in the framing clause tends to be of the cognition-utterance type. Furthermore, these constructions exhibit similar pragmatic functions to complements in other languages — such as the framing clause contributing to the epistemicity and stance of the framed clause. Thus we observe that while Indonesian indeed has resources for expressing these types of semantic and pragmatic relationships, they have not been grammaticized as morphosyntactic complementation per se. This chapter seeks to push the envelope of this approach even further: what other resources does Indonesian possess for encoding the semantic relationships often encoded by grammatical complementation in other languages? One of these resources, which I will refer to as the ‘epistemic -nya construction’, looks formally very different from anything resembling complementation. No traditional Indonesian grammarian would analyze these constructions as complements; yet, they serve similar semantic and pragmatic framing functions to “genuine” grammatical complements in other languages, and to the constructions discussed in the previous three chapters. This observation is partially inspired by, and reminiscent of, Dixon’s (1995) work on ‘complementation strategies’. I will devote the next several paragraphs to review Dixon’s approach, and to compare and contrast it with my own
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findings in the colloquial conversational Indonesian corpus. An outline of Dixon’s approach, as well as definitions of his terms, were already given in 1.3, so I will only briefly summarize the points relevant to the present discussion. According to Dixon: “The semantic task of complement-clause constructions is to code the relation between a matrix verb (whether of Primary-B or Secondary type) and the complement-clause verb” (Dixon 1995: 178). Dixon contends that this “semantic task”, as well as the semantic classes of “primary-B” and “Secondary” concepts, are universally expressed by all languages. Thus, in languages which do not utilize the grammatical resource of complementation, there still must be a way to express the relationship between these semantic concepts: “Each language must have some grammatical means for linking a PRIMARY-B verb and the verb describing the action or state that the Primary-B verb refers to” (1995: 176). It is crucial to point out that for Dixon, ‘complementation strategies’ are always signaled grammatically: There are a number of ways in which a language can grammatically code the link between a Secondary or Primary-B verb and a second verb. The main ones are: 1. The second verb can be nominalised, and then function as head of an NP in subject or object function to the Secondary or Primary-B verb. 2. Both verbs can appear, in apposition, in the same verb phrase. 3. The verbs can occur in separate clauses, which are linked together by one of a number of grammatical strategies. (1995: 179)
Two of these ‘complementation strategies’ are evident in Dyirbal, one of the languages Dixon claims does not have a grammatical category of complementation: relativization (in which the complement-like clause is relativized on an NP argument in the “matrix” clause); and clauses linked by a purposive marker. Both belong to #3 on the list just cited. The three types of relationships subsumed in #3, as described later in Dixon’s article (1995: 180–181) are coordination, complementation, and relativization. All of the coordination examples presented by Dixon contain some sort of overt link between clauses — adverbial conjunctions, purposive markers, or other clause linkers. The article is silent on whether juxtaposed clauses with no overt connectives would actually be considered instances of coordination. With this in mind, it is not clear whether any of the Indonesian constructions discussed in the previous three chapters would count as instances of ‘complementation strategies’ as defined by Dixon. To qualify as a ‘complementation strategy’, clauses must show some sort of grammatical link — but for the Indonesian constructions the relationship is purely inferential. For instance, the juxtaposed clauses described in Chapter 2 do not have any grammatical link at
Epistemic -nya constructions
all between them, and interlocutors must infer the relationship based on verb semantics and contextual cues. As demonstrated in Chapter 3, bahwa is best analyzed as a discourse marker, serving larger, discourse-structuring functions, rather than a linker between coordinated clauses. I suggest, therefore, that Dixon’s definition of ‘complementation strategies’ needs to be broadened in two ways. First, its scope should expand beyond a definition based solely on signaling semantic relations between verbs, to include motivation based on discourse and pragmatic factors (such as framing and stance). Secondly, the structures which count as ‘complementation strategies’ need to be extended beyond simple clause-level grammatical relations into the realm of inference and discourse structure. As I will demonstrate in this chapter, Indonesian appears to have a ‘complementation strategy’ not included on Dixon’s list cited above. In fact, it is diametrically opposite to the first strategy in the list. According to this strategy: “The second verb can be nominalised, and then function as head of an NP in subject or object function to the Secondary or Primary-B verb” (1995: 179). However, in the Indonesian strategy I will discuss here, it is the first predicate (the CTP — or, in Dixon’s terminology the “Primary-B” or “Secondary” concept) which gets nominalized with the clitic -nya. This nominalization is then embedded into the second clause (i.e. into the one which would be the complement), providing framing for the rest of this clause. This framing generally provides evidentiality (source of knowledge), assessment of interactional relevance (degree of value placed on an utterance by the speaker — usually toward its contribution to the ongoing interaction), or stance (mental/ emotional attitude) toward the proposition expressed by the rest of the clause. All of these factors are characteristics of CTPs (cf. Ono and Thompson 1995, Thompson 2002), and, as expressions of epistemic modality, they have characteristics similar to those described for complements by Ransom (1986) and Frajzyngier (1995). I will refer to this Indonesian strategy as ‘epistemic -nya constructions’, and will devote the remainder of this chapter to its characterization and description. The following example contains two instances of epistemic -nya constructions. (1) (“Dingdong” IU 833–835) 833 … pokoknya bukan minum bir aja. basic-nya neg drink beer just 834 … Minumnya, drink-nya
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835
.. melebihi= Martini katanya. at-more-app martini word-nya “the thing is, they weren’t just drinking beer. Their drinking even surpassed martinis, they said.”
In this excerpt, L (Lala) is telling two friends about four women he had met at a bar the previous evening. He was shocked by the amount of alcohol they had consumed, and their relative lack of any observable side effects. (1) contains three tokens of the -nya clitic — only two of which, however, are instances of the epistemic -nya construction. IU 833 contains an equational clause: the subject pokoknya ‘the main thing’ followed by the nominal predicate bukan minum bir aja ‘they weren’t just drinking beer’. (Note that the negative particle bukan is usually described as only negating NPs, suggesting that the rest of this clause is in fact a predicate nominal.) Pokoknya ‘the main thing’ contains the -nya clitic, and provides an epistemic frame for the remainder of the clause: with this word, L frames the rest of the clause in terms of his assessment of its relevance for the interaction — as something especially important for the interlocutors to pay attention to. It is the fact that these women were “not just drinking beer” which provides the context from which the rest of his narrative should be understood, and thus he highlights it with this assessment. IUs 834–835 contain another clause: minumnya ‘drinking’ is the A-argument of the verb melebihi ‘surpass’, which is marked both with the A-trigger prefix meN- and the applicative suffix -i, which indexes the object NP martini. Note also that the -nya clitic in IU 834 serves to nominalize the verb minum ‘drink’, and is not an epistemic construction. I will discuss this nominalizing function of -nya in 5.2.3. The second epistemic -nya construction in this example occurs in IU 835. Kata ‘word’ is suffixed with -nya, providing evidential modality for the preceding clause — it provides the source of the information as something told to the speaker. The fact that the women were ‘drinking more than martinis’ is framed as something the women actually had told L. Kata ‘word’ can function as a prototypical perception-cognition-utterance verb, and the framing katanya ‘word’ can be paraphrased here with mereka berkata ‘they said’. In sum, both IUs 833 and 835 contain a nominalized word suffixed by -nya, which serves to frame the rest of the clause, providing an epistemic/evidential modality in the same way as complements do in other languages. For this reason, I believe an examination of epistemic -nya constructions as a ‘comple-
Epistemic -nya constructions
mentation strategy’ in Indonesian is warranted. After an overview of the general functions of -nya in 5.2, I will turn to a discussion of its framing functions, and will discuss some of the very frequent lexicalized framing tokens suffixed with this clitic.
5.2 General overview of -nya Before pursuing an analysis of epistemic -nya constructions, it is necessary to provide a more general overview of the uses of this clitic in the Indonesian corpus. -Nya is by far the most frequent affix in the corpus, with a total of 1570 tokens in the six speech events. This is greater than the total number of both agent-trigger and patient-trigger verbal prefixes combined (1158). However, despite its high frequency, little work has been done to characterize and analyze its broad range of functions. Part of the reason for this is undoubtedly its common occurrence in constructions which formal grammars of Indonesian consider non-standard. While a complete analysis of this morpheme is clearly warranted, this section provides only a cursory overview of its uses in the database, and hypothesizes how these forms are interrelated. As such, this section provides a preliminary analysis of the general functions of -nya, which I hope to further pursue in future research. Only 580 of the 1570 tokens of -nya in the database are coded as expressing epistemic/evidential modality. Thus epistemic -nya constructions are a subset of the more general use of this clitic, comprising about 1/3 of all occurrences of this morpheme. The following subsections describe the general range of functions associated with -nya, for all of its 1570 occurrences in the corpus. An understanding of these broader, multifaceted functions is necessary as background to the specific instances of epistemic -nya constructions described starting in 5.3. 5.2.1 -nya as possessive marker In formal grammars of Indonesian, the main function of -nya is as an anaphoric third-person possessive marker. The possessed NP is suffixed with -nya, which functions pronominally to index the possessor. The possessor, in turn, either has been previously mentioned in the discourse, or is inferable from context. The following two examples from the database are illustrative.
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(2) (“Muram” IU 768–769) dia meniru ibunya, 3sg at-imitate mother-nya 769 dia meniru .. pamannya, 3sg at-imitate uncle-nya “He imitates his mother, he imitates his uncle…” (3) (“Pencuri” IU 218) A: … Namanya kan Rifka. name-nya prt Rifka “Her name was Rifka.”
In both (2) and (3), a person has been previously introduced into the discourse, and a possessed NP is suffixed with -nya to indicate the identity of the possessor as the third-person referent just mentioned. In grammars of standard Indonesian, this clitic prescriptively only occurs with third-person singular referents. However, the following examples illustrate possession by other than a third-person singular possessor. In (4), -nya indexes the speaker — a first-person referent. (4) (“Pencuri” IU 14) … dompetnya dicoklat kan di situ, wallet-nya trunc brown prt at there “My brown wallet was there.”
(5) consists of -nya being used to index the addressee — a second-person referent. (5) (“Blewah” IU 1303) D: Padahal ibunya nggak suka ramai kan. in.fact mother-nya neg like crowded prt “In fact your mother doesn’t like to be around crowds, does she?”
This example could be interpreted in two ways. First, grammars of Indonesian have traditionally analyzed this as a third-person marker, being used indirectly to refer to the addressee. Third person reference to addressees is in fact a common politeness strategy in Indonesian, and this may very well be the case in this example. Alternatively, this could also be interpreted as indicating that -nya may in fact additionally be used for second-person possessors. The following occurrence of -nya indexes third-person plural.
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(6) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 245) (H) Lha ya semua orang matanya kan ada putihnya gitu]. prt prt all person eye-nya prt ex white-nya thus “Everyone’s eyes have whites in them.” (Lit. “as for all people, their eyes have whites.”)
This example is a possessor topic-comment sentence: the topic semua orang ‘all people’ is followed by a comment clause. The subject of the comment clause is mata ‘eye’ which is suffixed with the -nya clitic, apparently referring back to the referent of the topic portion of the sentence — a third-person plural antecedent. These examples show that -nya in fact serves to index more than only thirdperson singular possessors: a first-person singular in (4), arguably a secondperson singular antecedent in (5), and a third-person plural in (6). The following two examples illustrate another possessive construction prevalent in the database which is generally considered nonstandard — the occurrence of -nya with an overt possessor. In this construction, the possessed NP is suffixed with -nya and immediately followed by the possessor NP. (7) (“Pencuri” IU 3563) Kamu bau tangannya Ari itu=. 2sg smell arm-nya Ari that.dem “You’re smelling Ari’s arm.”
In this example, tangan ‘arm’ is suffixed with -nya, and then followed by the possessor: tangannya Ari ‘Ari’s arm’. The standard way of expressing possessives with an overt possessor does not involve -nya at all. According to standard Indonesian grammar, this construction should be rendered: tangan Ari, with no -nya clitic on the possessed NP. The following example is similar. (8) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 978) anaknya seorang tokoh juga. child-nya 1.person.cl personage also “Also the child of a prominent figure.”
In (8), the possessed NP anak ‘child’ is suffixed by -nya and followed by the possessor seorang tokoh ‘a prominent figure’. Again, the standard rendering of this construction would be anak seorang tokoh, without the -nya on the possessed NP. This use of -nya is frequent in all six speech events, irrespective of formality. Another construction which makes use of the possessive -nya is termed “possessor topic-comment clause” (Sneddon 1996: 278). We have already seen one such example in (6) above, in which the possessor semua orang ‘all people’
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serves as the topic, and -nya occurs on an NP in the comment clause to indicate possession. Following is one more example. (9) (“Wisuda” IU 83) … Mobil temen kemarin tape-nya hilang. car friend yesterday tapedeck-nya lost “My friend’s car, the other day its tape deck was stolen.”
Here, mobil teman ‘friend’s car’ (a standard Indonesian possessive without the -nya on the overt possessor) serves as a topic. The comment clause consists of the time adverbial kemarin ‘yesterday’ followed by the subject and predicate tapenya hilang ‘its tape deck was lost (i.e. stolen)’. The -nya clitic refers back to the friend’s car in the topic. As with pronominal forms in general, sometimes the antecedent is unclear to the addressees, as in (10) below. In this example, L (Lucy) asks D (Adit) for clarification as to the antecedent of the possessor. (10) (“Pencuri” IU 626–632) 626 D: dari belakang ini, from back this 627 pencopetnya buka kalungnya. pickpocket-nya open necklace-nya 628 M: Ha. 629 D: Dia buka kalungnya gini [dia kan], 3sg open necklace-nya like.this [3sg prt 630 L: [Kalungnya] si Agnes? [necklace-nya prt Agnes 631 D: Kalungnya Agnes. necklace-nya Agnes 632 Ho-o. aff “The pickpocket undid her necklace from behind. He undid the necklace like this, he did. (L:) Agnes’s necklace? (D:) Agnes’s necklace, yes.”
This example is an excerpt from the beginning of a personal experience narrative, which D (Adit) was sharing with her friends. Adit and Agnes (who is not present) were riding a bus together. They were standing, facing each other, since the bus was crowded. Agnes felt someone standing behind her trying to unclasp her necklace. Because both of Agnes’s hands were full, she whispered to Adit (who is standing facing her) to pull on her necklace from the front after
Epistemic -nya constructions
the pickpocket has unclasped it, thus snatching it away from the pickpocket and thwarting the attempted robbery. In IU 627, the NP kalung ‘necklace’ is introduced into the narrative, suffixed with the -nya clitic, and D restates her utterance in IU 629. The clitic here seems to index the owner of the necklace, but since this is its first mention (and since Indonesian pronouns are not specified for gender), the possessor of the necklace is ambiguous — it could be Agnes, or it could be the thief. In IU 630, L asks for disambiguation of the referent: kalungnya si Agnes? ‘Agnes’s necklace?’. In IUs 631–632, D confirms that Agnes is indeed the antecedent of -nya here. (10) contains a total of 5 tokens of -nya: two standard uses of -nya as thirdperson possessive clitic (on kalung ‘necklace’ in IUs 627 and 629), two instances of the (nonstandard) possessive with overt possessor (on kalung ‘necklace’ in IUs 630 and 631), and one token of -nya which in no way can be interpreted as a possessive — on pencopet ‘pickpocket’ in IU 627. Pencopet ‘pickpocket’ is not a possessed NP; rather, -nya functions here to indicate identifiability, which is the topic of the following subsection. 5.2.2 -nya as identifiability marker Following Chafe (1994: 93) “To put it simply, an identifiable referent is one the speaker assumes the listener will be able to identify.” As Chafe goes on to demonstrate, identifiability is actually a very complex phenomenon, related to (but not identical to) activation cost and other information-flow properties. Chafe recognizes three major components of identifiability: “An identifiable referent is one that is (a) assumed to be already shared, directly or indirectly, by the listener; (b) verbalized in a sufficiently identifying way; and (c) contextually salient” (Chafe 1994: 94). The aim of this subsection is not to provide a review of concepts and literature on this topic, but merely to show the role of -nya in marking identifiable referents. Two studies, however, are particularly relevant. Du Bois and Thompson (1991) propose five ‘identifiability pathways’ — means by which referents can be identifiable: (i) interlocutors are identifiable by virtue of their co-presence in the speech situation; (ii) other entities in the physical context of the speech situation are identifiable; (iii) an entity is identifiable through prior mention in the discourse; (iv) a referent is identifiable through “anchoring” to another identifiable referent (cf. Prince 1981); (v) identifiability can be evoked by reference to a cognitive frame or cultural script. Ewing (1995) applies these notions to conversational data in Cirebon Javanese (a variety of Javanese spoken in West Java), and proposes a linguistic division of labor based
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on Du Bois and Thompson’s taxonomy. Like Indonesian, Cirebon has at least two linguistic devices for coding identifiability: demonstrative determiners, and a clitic -é (which is probably a cognate of Indonesian -nya). Ewing claims that these two linguistic devices code different ranges of the taxonomy proposed by Du Bois and Thompson: demonstrative determiners code identifiability based on directly shared referents (pathways i-iii), while the -é clitic codes indirectly identifiable referents, based on anchoring, scripts, or frames (pathways iv-v). The Indonesian data shows similar distribution — the demonstrative determiners ini ‘this’ and itu ‘that’ tend to code identifiable referents based on copresence in the speech context or prior mention in the discourse, while -nya tends to mark referents which are identifiable based on anchoring or those evoked by a frame or script. As I will demonstrate later in this section, there are counterexamples to these tendencies, and further analysis is clearly warranted. These ‘identifiability pathways’ are not mutually exclusive, and it is common to find NPs marked both with a demonstrative determiner and with a clitic, presumably indicating the simultaneous co-occurrences of multiple ‘identifiability pathways’. Furthermore, it is important to point out that identifiability is not marked obligatorily in Indonesian, and therefore the lack of a determiner or clitic does not necessarily indicate a lack of identifiability. The issues are extremely complex, and I will present many types of examples in this subsection. Clearly, there is a relationship between possessive -nya and identifiability marking. All possessed NPs are also identifiable, based on “anchoring” to an already identifiable referent — namely the possessor (cf. Prince 1981 for indepth discussion of anchoring). Thus, in (10) for example, all instances of kalung ‘necklace’ are identifiable, based on their association with an identifiable possessor (either Agnes, or, in L’s possible interpretation, the thief — both of which are identifiable based on prior mention earlier in the narrative). It is this type of possessor anchoring which has presumably led to the additional grammaticization of -nya as a marker of identifiability. To return to the discussion of (10), there is one instance of -nya as a marker of identifiability but which does not also have the function of possessive marking. Pencopet ‘pickpocket’ in IU 627 is marked with -nya; clearly no referent possesses the thief, and so -nya is functioning only as an identifiability marker. There are at least two potential ‘pathways’ of identifiability in this case. One is based on prior mention in the discourse, and the other is potentially based in a frame. Regarding prior mention, the thief was introduced in the preface to the narrative in IU 599 as follows.
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(11) (“Pencuri” IU 595–601) 595 D: Aku pernah lho, 1sg ever prt (3 IUs of irrelevant overlap consisting of another speaker concluding a narrative.) 599 D: Ngelab- .. ngelabui itu pencopet, trunc at-deceive-app that.dem pickpocket 600 Ngelab- — trunc 601 Aku sama Agnes kan? 1sg with Agnes prt “Once I outsmarted a thief; me and Agnes, right?”
This preface shows the first mention of the thief in D’s narrative. The next mention occurs in IU 627, as represented by (10) after intervening material about how Adit and Agnes were standing in the bus, and the reason why Agnes’s hands were full. According to the taxonomy of activation cost proposed by Chafe (1987, 1994, inter alia), the NP pencopet ‘thief ’ is semi-active; while it is identifiable to the interlocutors, it is being reintroduced into “active consciousness”. Perhaps one of the functions of -nya as an identifiability marker is to code the identifiability of previously-mentioned but semi-active concepts, while, on the other hand, a previously mentioned and active concept would be more likely to be coded with itu ‘that’. Further discussion and investigation of this hypothesis lies outside the scope of the present chapter. A second potential ‘identifiability pathway’ for this token of pencopet ‘thief ’ in IU 627 perhaps arises from a cultural frame — namely the knowledge and expectation that buses in Indonesia are likely to have pickpockets on them. If this is true, then -nya in IU 627 is marking indirect identifiability based on cultural expectations. The following extended example is instructive in that it illustrates identifiability based on both a cognitive frame and a cultural script. And the dual nature of -nya as both a possessive and identifiability marker leads to double entendre. Several contextual notes are necessary to understand this excerpt. This example deals with a television commercial for coffee, which recently had been airing in Indonesia. In the previous discourse, one of the interlocutors said a phrase which evoked the prior text of this commercial: yo i — a phatic utterance, which one of the actors says in the context of the commercial, ostensibly to indicate his satisfaction with the coffee. Prior to the beginning of this excerpt, one of the interlocutors utters this phrase, in the context of Lala
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and Anton talking about moving to a new (and better) house, which they are extremely satisfied with. This immediately evokes the coffee commercial, and the excerpt is taken from the middle of the discussion of it. One notable feature of this advertisement is the humor evoked for the interlocutors by the ambiguity of the word susu, which means either ‘milk’ or ‘breast’. (12) (“Dingdong” IU 381–392) 381 A: %% Ceweknya sih lumayan, girl-nya prt not.bad 382 Cuma gimana [gayanya gitu lho taek tu]. only how fashion-nya thus prt shit prt 383 L: [ (H) Cowoknya] itu. guy-nya that.dem 384 … Kopinya apa? coffee-nya what 385 Susunya nikmat, milk-nya delicious breast-nya enjoyable 386 yang kopinya mantap. rel coffee-nya strong 387 [Cra=t]. sound — (disgusting) of something squirting 388 A: [@@@@] 389 E: Yo_i. imitating utterance from commercial “(A:) The girl isn’t too bad. Except her fashion is like shit. (L:) That guy. What (does he say about) the coffee? The milk is delicious {alternatively “her breasts are enjoyable”}, the coffee is strong. Chrat! Yo I!”
(12) begins with A (Anton) commenting that the woman in the commercial is not-too-bad-looking — except for her style of clothing which he characterizes as taek ‘shit’. In IU 311, A introduces cewek ‘girl’ into the discourse as a first mention. However, because of identifiability based on association with the frame of this commercial, the -nya suffix is used to code identifiability. In IU 312, -nya functions as a possessive marker, indexing the girl mentioned in the previous IU as the possessor of gaya ‘fashion/style’, and therefore it also functions as an identifiability marker through anchoring. In IU 383, L (Lala) begins to paraphrase the commercial. He introduces the referent cowok ‘guy’, which is marked identifiable with -nya — again through association with the frame of the commercial. The presence here of the demonstrative determiner
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itu ‘that’ is puzzling, since this is the first mention of cowok ‘guy’. One interpretation for the presence of this demonstrative is that the interlocutors are all visualizing this commercial, and ‘that guy’ is a spatial deictic, referring to the co-presence of a particular guy the interlocutors are picturing in this mental space. The -nya clitic on kopi ‘coffee’ in IU 384 again is likely coding identifiability through the cognitive frame of the ad. Susu ‘milk/breast’ is introduced in IU 385, and the dual function of the -nya suffix further exploits the ambiguity of the word’s referent. In the context of the commercial, susunya can either mean ‘her breasts’ (the possessor being the not-so-bad-looking woman in the commercial) or ‘the milk’ — which is identifiable by virtue of the cultural script of putting milk in one’s coffee. The intended meaning of L’s use of the ideophone crat in IU 387 is left to the interlocutors’ imaginations, and E (Evan) concludes the paraphrase of the commercial with the phatic yo i, which had evoked it in the first place. In sum, this commercial highlights both the possessive and the identifiability-marking functions of -nya, and exploits this ambiguity for the effect of humor. Unlike the case of Cirebon -é as discussed by Ewing (1995), several examples in the Indonesian data seem to suggest that -nya codes identifiability on prior mention, serving some sort of function in referent tracking. (13) below is illustrative. This also runs counter to Sneddon’s claim for standard Indonesian that -nya is only used “where the noun has not before been mentioned” (Sneddon 1996: 150–151). The following is from one of the two more-formal speech events in the database, and exemplifies -nya occurring on three successive tokens of the NP doa ‘prayer’. This is the first example we have seen thus far of -nya occurring on successive mentions. (13) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 1873–1877) 1873 N: .. E= kalau mendoakan orang yang beda agama, um if at-pray-app person rel different religion 1874 boleh nggak. may neg 1875 T: … Tergantung doanya. depend prayer-nya 1876 N: … Kalau doanya baik? if prayer-nya good 1877 T: … Doanya baik misalnya? prayer-nya good example-nya “As for praying for someone of a different religion, is that okay or not?
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(T:) It depends on the prayer. (N:) “If it’s a good prayer?” (T:) “A good prayer like what?”
The NP doa ‘prayer’ in IU 1875 is coded as identifiable, presumably based on association with the verb mendoakan ‘pray for someone’ in IU 1873. The next two occurrences of doa ‘pray’ are also suffixed with -nya, in IUs 1876 and 1877, and appear to be tracking the referent. (The other occurrence of -nya, on misalnya ‘say/ for example’ in IU 1877, is an instance of an epistemic -nya construction I will discuss below in 5.3.3.) I include this example here to suggest the need for further research into the types of identifiability coded by -nya in colloquial conversational Indonesian, as this area is not well described or analyzed. The following example shows the occurrence of both -nya and a determiner to indicate the identifiability of an NP. (14) (“Blewah” IU 25) I: … Blewahnya itu jangan dijus. melon-nya that.dem don’t pt-juice “Don’t juice that melon.”
In this example, the demonstrative determiner itu ‘that’ is being used deictically to mark the ‘melon’ as identifiable. This is an example of (ii) on the taxonomy proposed by Du Bois and Thompson, since the melon is co-present in the speech situation; it is also identifiable by virtue of prior mention, since blewah ‘melon’ was mentioned two IUs previous. Presumably, -nya indicates some other identifiability pathway — perhaps identifiability based on a cultural script. The women in this speech event are planning on making some sort of fruit drink, which could involve the juicing of a melon, and thus the melon could be identifiable by knowledge of how to make this drink. Another interesting feature of -nya is its ability to occur repeatedly within a single NP, as in the following example. Presumably, the first occurrence is as a marker of possession, and the second codes identifiability. The entire NP also occurs with the demonstrative itu ‘that’, indicating prior mention. (15) (“Pencuri” IU 528) L: tasnya ceweknya itu. bag-nya girl-nya that.dem “that girl’s bag.”
In addition to demonstrative determiners, other frequent indicators of identifiability are pronouns and proper names. Unlike in languages such as English, in which pronouns and proper names cannot manifest other markers of identifi-
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ability, Indonesian does not have these restrictions — and all three sources of identifiability (pronoun or proper name, -nya, and determiner) can co-occur in a single NP. The following four examples are illustrative. In (16), -nya is suffixed to the third-person singular pronoun dia. (16) (“Pencuri” IU 1197) Mungkin dianya denger juga, possible 3sg-nya hear also “Maybe he heard too.”
In (17), -nya is affixed to the proper name Agus in IU 7. (17) (“Wisuda” IU 3–7) 3 J: Tadi pagi nyampe jam .. tujuh. just.now morning at-arrive hour seven 4 A: Jam tujuh ya. hour seven prt 5 J: Ho-o. aff 6 … Aku kan, 1sg prt 7 Mana Agusnya. where Agus-nya “(J:) I got there this morning at seven. (A:) Yeah, seven. (J:) Mhm. I was like ‘Where’s Agus’?”
In (18), the third-person singular pronoun dia is suffixed with -nya and followed by the distal demonstrative determiner itu ‘that’. (18) (“Pencuri” IU 1469) … trus dianya itu mepet-mepet aku gitu lho. then 3sg-nya that.dem at-press.redup 1sg thus prt “He kept jostling me like.”
In the following example, the proper name Erika in IU 2760 is suffixed with -nya and co-occurs with itu ‘that’. (The occurrence of -nya in untungnya ‘fortunately’ in the same IU is an epistemic mental attitude construction, which I will discuss below in 5.3.2.) (19) (“Pencuri” IU 2760–2761) 2760 .. Terus untungnya Erikanya itu, then fortune-nya Erika-nya that.dem
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2761 udah ngerti itu lho. already at-understand that.dem prt “Fortunately Erika understood what was going on.”
The following two examples demonstrate the occurrence of -nya on demonstrative determiners themselves, when they are being used anaphorically. In (20), -nya occurs on ini ‘this’, and on itu ‘that’ in (21). (20) (“Wisuda” IU 1156) ya ini ininya ya. yes this this-nya prt “Yes, this is it.” (i.e. “This is the one.”) (21) (“Wisuda” IU 1138) A: Tapi kan nggak ada itunya. but prt neg ex that.dem-nya “But there isn’t one (of those).”
5.2.3 -nya as nominalizer Another frequent function of -nya is as a nominalizer. Presumably, this function has grammaticized from its use as an identifiability marker. Because of its close association with nominal expressions, when it is affixed to a lexical item from a different word class, this item takes on the characteristics of a noun. -Nya as a nominalizer frequently can be observed in equational clauses such as in IU 834 of (1), the first example in this chapter. Here, -nya is affixed to the verb minum ‘drink’, which is the subject of the sentence translated as “Their drinking even surpassed martinis.” Following are two more examples of -nya used to nominalize verbs in equational constructions. (22) (“Pencuri” IU 1872) .. mereka turunnya di= itu kali Code situ. 3pl get.off-nya at that.dem river Code there “They got off the bus there at the Code river.” (Lit. “Their getting off was at the river Code there.”) (23) (“Pencuri” IU 3632) kan itu belinya di Kupang. prt that.dem buy-nya at Kupang “He bought it in Kupang.” (Lit. “As for that, its buying was in Kupang.”)
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5.2.4 -nya as pronominal marker Another function of -nya is as a pronominal suffix on verbs, to indicate a pronominal P-argument. In the following example, -nya indicates a pronominal P-argument in an A-trigger clause. (24) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 1674) T: Tapi jelas kita tidak mungkin melakukannya, but clear 1pl neg possible at-do-app-nya “But it’s clear that it’s impossible for us to do it.”
The following example is similar, as -nya in IU 473 indicates an unexpressed P-argument, but unlike in the previous example, this verb contains no overt trigger morphology. (25) (“Dingdong” IU 473–474) 473 .. Matiinnya gimana nih. die-app-nya how this 474 Nggak bisa dimatiin, neg can pt-die-app “How do you turn it off? You can’t turn it off.”
In standard Indonesian grammars, -nya is also characterized as the marker of a third-person A-argument in P-trigger clauses. In such a construction, the verb is prefixed by the P-trigger marker di- and -nya occurs as a suffix to indicate a referential, anaphoric, third-person agent. There are no examples of this construction in the corpus. Instead, -nya only occurs on di-prefixed verbs with an unknown or irrelevant agent, as in IU 1744 of the following example. (26) (“Wisuda” IU 1743–1744) 1743 Kok tahu dia kuncinya cuman, prt know 3sg key-nya only 1744 di situ diletakinnya tuh. at there pt-place-app-nya prt “How could he have known the key was stored there.”
This same construction, in which -nya indicates the unknown or irrelevant agent of a P-trigger clause, is also exemplified in the following. Here, L is saying that he dislikes the coffee commercial discussed in (12).
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(27) (“Dingdong” IU 376) udah nggak enak dilihatnya, already neg pleasant pt-see-nya “It’s not pleasant to see.”
-Nya also occurs as a suffix on prepositions, representing an anaphoric, pronominal, prepositional object. The following example is illustrative. (28) (“Wisuda” IU 84) .. Tape sama= barang-barang di dalamnya. tapedeck with thing.redup at inside-nya “His tapedeck and everything inside (the car).”
5.2.5 -nya as adverbial marker -Nya also serves in the formation of a subset of frequent adverbial constructions. In the following three examples, the one-place predicate biasa ‘usual/ normal’ is suffixed with -nya, meaning ‘usually’. (29) (“Pencuri” IU 709) Biasanya mereka tu pake jaket, usual-nya 3pl that.dem use jacket “Usually they use a jacket.” (30) (“Pencuri” IU 893) M: Diajak ngomong biasanya. pt-invite at-talk usual-nya “They get us into conversation, usually.” (31) (“Pencuri” IU 2535) .. Dia biasanya bilang gini Mbak, 3sg usual-nya say thus sister “He usually says: ‘ma’am …’”
These three examples show that the position of biasanya ‘usually’ is variable within the clause — a characteristic of adverbials. In (29), biasanya ‘usually’ occurs clause-initially, it occurs clause-finally in (30), and clause-internally (between subject and predicate) in (31). Presumably this adverbial function of -nya has grammaticized from its use as a nominalizer in equationals. The structure of (29) could be interpreted as an equational: “The usual thing is: they use a jacket.” However, the remaining two examples display a range of distributional possibilities for biasanya ‘usually’ within the clause itself, which would
Epistemic -nya constructions
be uncharacteristic for equationals. Based on this factor, as well as the high frequency of fixed lexical expressions such as biasanya ‘usually’, I suggest that -nya here is functioning as an adverbial marker. The following illustrates -nya marking an adverb of time. (32) (“Pencuri” IU 933) .. Besoknya datang. tomorrow-nya come “She came the next day.”
(33) illustrates the use of a common, adverb-forming circumfix se- -nya, in this case to form an adverb of manner. (33) (“Dingdong” IU 427–428) 427 E: Kapan pindah La. when move Lala 428 L: Ya e secepatnya. prt prt as-fast-nya “(E:) When are you moving, Lala? (L:) Well, as quickly as possible.”
In this example, E (Evan) asks Lala when he is planning to move to his new house. Lala answers with a manner adverbial, formed from the stem cepat ‘fast’ affixed with the circumfix se- -nya. This circumfix tends to form adverbs meaning roughly “as (stem) as possible”. The adverbial function of -nya is especially relevant for the discussion of -nya as framing device in the remainder of this chapter. 5.2.6 Summary In this section, I have provided an overview of the general functions and characteristics of -nya. I have presented examples of its use as a possessive marker (third-person and other persons, standard and nonstandard), an identifiability marker, a nominalizer, a pronominal affix on verbs and prepositions, and I have shown its adverbializing function for some frequent expressions. I have suggested that all of these are inter-related, and have hypothesized a cline of grammaticization across these various functions. Much in-depth analysis of these constructions is still necessary, but lies outside the scope of this section, which seeks only to provide a general overview of this morpheme and to introduce the reader to its many functions. There are additional occurrences of -nya in the database which do not fit neatly into any of these categories, and
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a more comprehensive analysis would need to account for them as well. The main purpose of this section has been to provide the reader with a general appreciation of the complex, multifaceted nature of this clitic, which is relevant for understanding its use as a framing device in the pseudo-complements discussed in the remainder of this chapter.
5.3 -nya as framing device In the previous section I have exemplified a number of the grammatical characteristics of -nya in the context of its various functions. I will now turn to a discussion of how this clitic is used in a ‘complementation strategy’ to indicate epistemic modality, and how this is achieved from the general functions of -nya surveyed in the previous section. As illustrated earlier in this chapter with example (1), a subset of occurrences of -nya — approximately one-third of the tokens of this suffix in the database — function like traditional CTPs in indicating modality and providing framing for another clause. I have characterized this framing as inherently epistemic, and have further classified it into three types, each of which I will address individually in the following three subsections: evidentiality, mental/emotional attitude, and assessment of interactional relevance. For the sake of terminological simplicity here, I will follow authors such as Palmer (1986) and Kärkkäinen (to appear), and will subsume evidentiality within the superordinate category of general epistemicity. I do recognize, however, that some authors take the opposite approach and consider epistemicity as a subcategory of evidentiality, but I do not wish to enter this terminological debate at present (cf. Kärkkäinen (to appear) for discussion). The following table lists all epistemic -nya constructions with more than five tokens in the database. All three types discussed in this section are represented. The following three subsections illustrate how these words function as a framing device for a clause. I suggest that their current functions as epistemic/ evidential adverbs have grammaticized from the lexical meaning of the stem. 5.3.1 Evidentials One subset of epistemic -nya constructions serves to frame the clause in terms of evidentiality — the source or means of knowledge of the utterance. The following two example show that the source of knowledge is another’s words.
Epistemic -nya constructions
Table 1.Frequent epistemic -nya constructions Word
Stem-gloss
Free translation
Tokens
misalnya kayaknya katanya pokoknya maksudnya soalnya sebenarnya artinya masalahnya makanya sebetulnya kelihatannya untungnya
example like/as word main meaning issue true meaning problem therefore true visible fortune
say/for example it seems (someone) said the thing is (someone) meant the problem is actually/truly that means the problem is for that reason truly looked to be fortunately
89 76 59 53 34 31 22 20 20 14 9 8 7
The -nya suffix occurs on the verb bilang ‘say’ in IU 940 of (34), and on the noun kata ‘word’ in (35). (34) (“Pencuri” IU 940–943) 940 Kakak bilangnya gini, sister say-nya like.this 941 kamu di sini dulu, 2sg at here first 942 saya mau ssaya- — 1sg want trunc trunc 943 saya mandi sebentar. 1sg bathe a.second “My sister said: wait here — I’m going to take a bath real quick.”
Here -nya occurs on the verb bilang ‘say’, and frames the rest of the utterance as the speech of the speaker’s sister. Grammatically, it is possible to analyze these constructions in at least three ways. One analysis would treat this example as an equational construction. -Nya serves to nominalize the verb bilang ‘say’ (as in the examples of nominalization presented in 5.2.3 above), which becomes the subject of the equational sentence: “My sister, her saying was like this: …” According to such an analysis, the CTP (bilang ‘say’) is nominalized, framing the rest of the utterance in terms of reported speech. A second analysis does not view -nya as a nominalizer, but would consider it as a pronominal object marker indexing the quoted material (comparable to the examples of pronominal
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object markers presented in 5.2.4 above): “My sister said (it) like this: …” Cumming (1991: 66–68) discusses these quotative constructions as being ambivalent between a nominal and a verbal analysis. For this reason, she concludes that they should be treated as their own construction type having unique properties, and excludes them from her database for text-counts of constituent order. I agree with Cumming’s (1991: 66–68) assessment of quotatives as a unique construction, but I would like to suggest a third analysis for them: namely, that this construction is adverbial in nature. The chief reason for this is its positional variability as actually observed in the data, which I will demonstrate throughout the remainder of this section. According to this analysis, -nya is functioning as an adverbial marker, and the quotative (whether noun or verb) is suffixed with this clitic and embedded as an evidential adverb within the quotation. (35) contains the framing word kata ‘word’, suffixed with -nya. (35) (“Dingdong” IU 855) kencing terus katanya. urinate straight word-nya “They said they kept urinating.”
This excerpt is a continuation of the discussion presented in (1) about the four women who Lala had met at a bar the previous evening. The women claim not to be drunk, despite having consumed a substantial amount of alcohol. The only thing they claim is unusual is that they have to keep urinating, which is the proposition of this excerpt. As with the previous example, the -nya suffix on kata ‘word’ can be analyzed in several ways. First, it could be understood as a possessive/identifiability marker (as in 5.2.1–5.2.2 above), in which case the noun kata ‘word’ is marked as being possessed by the person who is quoted. Alternatively, kata ‘word’ could be considered a verb (a form of the intransitive verb berkata ‘say’), and -nya then would be a pronominal object marker as in 5.2.4, indexing the quotation. However, I suggest that the most preferable analysis treats -nya as an adverbial marker (as in 5.2.5), and this quotative is embedded as an adverb within the quotation itself. Evidence for this comes from the ability of katanya ‘word+nya’ to occur in a variety of syntactic positions. The following three examples show this form occurring, respectively, clause-initially, clause-finally, and clauseinternally (between subject and verb), which is a type of syntactic variability unique to adverbs in Indonesian.
Epistemic -nya constructions
(36) (“Pencuri” IU 1707) katanya didikasih temennya, word-nya trunc pt-give friend-nya “She said her friend had given it to her.” (37) (“Pencuri” IU 863) Dia kan ketemu cowok cakep katanya. 3sg prt nonvol-meet guy handsome word-nya “She said she met a good-looking guy.” (38) (“Pencuri” IU 986–987) 986 .. Dia kan katanya mau nyari saudaranya, 3sg prt word-nya want at-look.for relative-nya 987 di sini. at here “He said he wanted to visit his relatives here.”
Thus the epistemic -nya construction in these examples is functioning adverbially, and evidentially framing the clause within which it occurs as reported speech. As observed above in Table 1, katanya is the third-most-frequent epistemic -nya construction in the database (after misalnya ‘say/for example’ and kayaknya ‘it seems’, to which I will return later in this chapter). For now, I would like to suggest that the high frequency of these forms has led to their ability to occur in a range of syntactic positions, and thus to their eventual grammaticization as adverbs. Following are more examples of the use of -nya as an evidential framing device. In these examples, the evidential source is coded as ‘thoughts’ (39) or ‘feelings’ (40). (39) (“Pencuri” IU 2542–2543) 2542 .. Jadi kita juga mikirnya, so 1pl also at-think-nya 2543 orang itu baik. person that.dem good “And so we also think, that person is good.” (40) (“Pencuri” IU 1–5) 1 L: Eh, hey 2 .. Ga, Ga
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3
waktu dia — time 3sg 4 kamu konangin itu, 2sg discover-app that.dem 5 nggak malu rasanya. neg embarrassed feel-nya “Hey, Mega. When you caught her, didn’t she feel embarrassed?”
In the following example, the evidential source is visual perception. The verb lihat ‘see’ is affixed with the stative/nonvolitional circumfix ke- -an, changing the meaning of the verb to ‘visible’, which is then suffixed with -nya. (The occurrence of -nya in IU 1248 is also epistemic, indicating the speaker’s assessment of interactional relevance, which I will discuss below in 5.3.3; the occurrence of -nya in IU 1251 is possessive, as discussed previously in 5.2.1.) (41) (“Pencuri” IU 1247–1251) 1247 Trus ada ibu-ibu yang keren itu lho. then ex mother.redup rel well.dressed that.dem prt 1248 .. Pokoknya, main-nya 1249 .. kelihatannya orang kaya itu lho, nonvol-see-nonvol-nya person rich that.dem prt 1250 dari ·opoÒ? from ·what 1251 .. Dandannya, attire-nya “And then there were some well-dressed women. The thing is, they looked like rich people — because of, what’s-it?, the way they were dressed.”
So far in this section, all of the stems suffixed by -nya have been CTPs par excellence: utterance, cognition, and perception. Like traditional CTPs of this type, they function to evidentially frame another clause, providing the specific means of knowledge for that clause (speaking, thinking, feeling, seeing, etc.) The remaining examples in this section also provide evidential framing for a clause, but the means of knowledge is general in nature, and is not specifically indicated. The second-most frequent epistemic -nya construction in the database, with 76 tokens in the 6 speech events, consists of the word kayak (a preposition generally glossed ‘like/as’) suffixed with -nya. This word appears to function as a general evidential marker, but indicates no specific source of knowledge; it
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appears to code inferred knowledge based on general perception, such as the English ‘seem’. In the following example, Mega notices that her watch has stopped. (Note the use of the speaker’s own name to refer to herself, which is a common first-person reference strategy in Indonesian.) (42) (“Pencuri” IU 2299) mati kayaknya jam Mega. dead like-nya watch Mega “My watch seems to have stopped.”
In this example, Mega does not indicate a specific evidential source for her statement that her watch has stopped, but codes it as an inference from general perception. The following example is similar. (43) (“Wisuda” IU 1703) .. Film bagus tuh horor kayaknya. film good prt horror like-nya “It seems to be a good horror film.”
In this excerpt, Jef has just changed to a different television station, and Agus comments that what he switched to appears to be a good horror movie — apparently a general inference from what is happening on screen. The following example indicates inference based on the speaker’s expectations. (44) (“Blewah” IU 508) I: Kayaknya enak. like-nya delicious “It sounds delicious.”
This is an excerpt from a discussion about a recipe which the speaker (Ilal) has at home for pie sukun goreng ‘fried breadfruit pie’. Ilal is describing it to the other three interlocutors over lunch, and the group consensus is that they plan to prepare it together sometime. Ilal has actually never cooked this dish, but her assessment of it as enak ‘delicious’ comes via inference from the ingredients called for by the recipe. Thus kayaknya here again appears to mark evidentiality based on general inference, rather than any specific source of knowledge. Grammatically, this form could be analyzed as the preposition kayak ‘like/ as’ suffixed with -nya, which is pronominally referring to the prepositional object. However, I again suggest that it is an adverb, based on its occurrence in three different positions within the clause. In (42), kayaknya ‘it seems’ occurs clause internally — between the predicate and the S-argument. In (43) it occurs
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clause-finally, and clause-initially in (44). In this section, I have provided examples of -nya as a means of encoding evidentiality. This suffix occurs on verbs (and nouns) of speaking, of thinking/ feeling, and of perception, and on the preposition kayak ‘like/as’. In each case, -nya serves to indicate that the affixed word is framing the rest of the clause within which it occurs. The semantic concepts encoded by these constructions are identical to those encoded by cognition-utterance predicates, which tend to be expressed cross-linguistically as CTPs. For this reason, I believe it is warranted to consider these evidential -nya constructions to be ‘complementation strategies’ in Indonesian. 5.3.2 Mental/emotional attitude Another subset of cognition-utterance predicates, which sometimes is expressed in Indonesian using an epistemic -nya construction, concerns the speaker’s mental or emotional attitude toward a proposition. The following two examples illustrate this with the verb takut ‘fear’, which occurs with the -nya suffix. (45) “Pencuri” IU 545–547 545 A: Takutnya tu, fear-nya that.dem 546 mereka bawa benda tajam, 3pl bring object sharp 547 gitu lho. thus prt “We’re afraid they might have sharp objects.” (46) (“Blewah” IU 13) … Takutnya lupa ya? fear-nya forget prt “Are you afraid you’ll forget?”
Another type of mental attitude has to do with the speaker’s evaluation of the favorability of an event. The following two examples are opposite, in terms of speaker stance. In (47), the speaker expresses a positive attitude toward the proposition, while the speaker in (48) characterizes his utterance as negative. (47) (“Pencuri” IU 697) L: Untungnya Si Agnes kerasa ya? fortune-nya prt Agnes nonvol-feel prt “It was fortunate that Agnes felt it, right?”
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In this example, the noun untung ‘fortune’ is suffixed with -nya. Again, because of its high frequency and positional variability, this word seems to function as an adverb ‘fortunately’. In this example, the speaker is framing as ‘fortunate’ the fact that Agnes felt the thief attempting to undo her necklace (cf. the narrative discussed in (10)). (48) (“Muram” IU 484–489) 484 Dan sayangnya memang, and pity-nya indeed 485 Garasi, Garasi 486 … nggak nggak kita, neg neg 1pl 487 … belum pernah ya, not.yet ever prt 488 melakukan diskusi setelah pementasan gitu ya, at-do-app discussion after performance thus prt 489 diskusi terbuka gitu. discussion stat-open thus “Unfortunately Garasi (name of a theater group), we don’t… We’ve never had a discussion after our performances, an open discussion like.”
This excerpt comes from a portion of the “Muram” speech event in which one of the group members is commenting on how their performances are perceived by others. He is lamenting the fact that the group does not offer a period of evaluation and discussion after their shows. The predicate sayang ‘pity’ is suffixed with -nya, and frames the rest of the utterance as being ‘unfortunate’. Another type of epistemic framing based on mental/emotional attitude has to do with the speaker’s wish to emphasize the content of the utterance as being particularly ‘true’. This is generally considered epistemic modality based on ‘speaker commitment’ (cf. Givón 2001b), which tends to be encoded by complementation cross-linguistically. One epistemic -nya construction which shows particularly high speaker commitment is the word sebenarnya ‘truly/ actually’. This word consists of the one-place predicate benar ‘true’, with the adverb-forming circumfix se- -nya, which was discussed in 5.2.5. Following are three examples. (49) (“Dingdong” IU 1437–1438) 1437 … Yang kemarin gua tu, rel yesterday 1sg prt
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1438 … nggak suka gua ama dia sebenarnya. neg like 1sg with 3sg actually “The one from the other day, the truth is I don’t like him.”
In this excerpt, Lala is discussing one of his classmates who sometimes pays him a visit at the student boardinghouse. In IU 1438, sebenarnya ‘truly/actually’ frames the rest of the utterance ‘I don’t like him’, and emphasizes Lala’s commitment to the truth of this assertion. The following example is similar. (50) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 1063–1066) 1063 .. Sekarang pertanyaan anda mungkin, now question 2sg maybe 1064 bolehkah perempuan yang menjadi kepala keluarga. may-prt woman rel be.as head family 1065 … (TSK) (H) Soal boleh dan tidak, issue may and neg 1066 itu hal yang paling sebenarnya tidak saya sukai, that.dem thing rel at.most actually neg 1sg like-app “And now your question might be: is it allowed for a woman to be the head of the family. The issue of (whether something is) allowed or not, is the thing that I truly dislike the most.”
This example comes from a portion of the talk show in which callers had been bringing up issues related to gender roles in the family. In this excerpt, the cleric/talk show host is asserting his dislike of the questions people tend to be asking him around this issue: boleh dan tidak ‘is it allowed or not’. He goes on to claim that he doesn’t like to give judgments on this issue for people to follow, but would prefer to see each individual family work these issues out for themselves, as it best suits their particular circumstances. The speaker uses sebenarnya ‘truly/actually’ in IU 1066 to epistemically frame the rest of this IU as being especially true. The speaker demonstrates strong commitment to his statement that he dislikes this question. In the following example, sebenarnya ‘truly/actually’ is being used in a question, to demand the truth from the interlocutor. (51) (“Pencuri” IU 279–280) 279 .. Sebenarnya ini saya punya uang atau bukan, actually this 1sg possess money or neg 280 saya bilang, 1sg say “‘Is this in fact my money or not’, I said.”
Epistemic -nya constructions
This example is part of a larger narrative sequence in which A (Ari) is describing her interaction with a (former) friend who had just stolen a substantial amount of money from her. Ari is demanding ‘the truth’, and uses sebenarnya ‘truly/actually’ to frame her question. The adverbial nature of sebenarnya ‘truly/actually’ is indicated both by its use of the general, adverb-forming circumfix se- -nya, as well as by its variable position within the clause. In (49), sebenarnya ‘truly/actually’ occurs clausefinally, it occurs clause-medially in (50), and clause-initially in (51). 5.3.3 Assessments of interactional relevance The epistemic -nya constructions surveyed in the previous two sections indicate evidentiality (the speaker’s source of knowledge of an utterance), or mental/ emotional attitude (the speaker’s epistemic stance toward, or beliefs about, an utterance). The constructions in this section, on the other hand, indicate the speaker’s assessment of how the current utterance should be situated in the ongoing discourse. We have already seen one such example in (1), in which the word pokoknya ‘the main point’ frames the rest of the utterance as being central to an understanding of the ongoing interaction. Following are two more examples of this construction. (52) (“Muram” IU 522–523) 522 Pokoknya babanyak banyak banyak influence dari dari, main-nya trunc much much much influence from from 523 .. dari warna musik lain, from color music different “The thing is, there’s a lot of influence from different styles of music.”
This excerpt comes from the context of the speaker recounting a discussion he had recently had with a third party. The speaker (and several of the interlocutors) are members of a musical group, and the discussion being recounted is a critique of the group’s music. the speaker is reporting that the critic was complaining that the music is not very original, and has no particularly unique style. The thrust of the critique is summed up in this excerpt, that the group’s music is just a hodgepodge — influenced by many different styles; the speaker uses pokoknya ‘the thing is’ to frame the rest of the utterance as the central claim by which the rest of the reported critique should be understood. The following example is similar.
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(53) (“Blewah” IU 898) N: Pokoknya temen-temen yang moto, main-nya friend.redup rel at-photo “The thing is, my friends were the ones who photographed me.”
This excerpt comes from the end of a section of the speech event where the interlocutors had been gossiping about a mutual acquaintance who had formerly worked as a fashion model. The speaker is reporting the words of this acquaintance, who allegedly claims she really did not want to be a model in the first place, but was only doing it at the encouragement of her friends. The speaker is using the form pokoknya ‘the thing is’ to indicate that the main point to understand concerning their acquaintance’s claims about her modeling career is that her friends were the ones who took the photographs and sent them in. Thus, pokoknya again frames the utterance in terms of its relevance for the ongoing interaction. The most frequent -nya construction in the database, with 89 tokens in the six speech events, is the word misalnya (best glossed as ‘say/for example’). This construction appears to be used by the speaker to frame the utterance in terms of hypothetical modality, as a hypothetical instance relevant to the general topic in the ongoing interaction. The following two examples are illustrative. (54) (“Pencuri” IU 43–52) 43 D: Tapi kan, but prt 44 Kita juga — 1pl also 45 … pernah e, ever um 46 misalnya, example-nya 47 aku misalnya lihat dompet Ari, 1sg example-nya see wallet Ari 48 terus pingin buka-buka, then want open-redup 49 lihat fotonya=, see picture-nya 50 apa lihat isinya, what see contents-nya 51 gitu ya? thus prt
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52
.. Apa dia nggak cuman sekedar … gitu aja. q 3sg neg just simply thus only “But, we also, you know… sometimes, say, I, say, see Ari’s wallet and want to open it to look at her pictures, to look at what’s inside it, you know? Wasn’t she maybe just simply doing that?”
In this excerpt, D (Adit) is responding to a personal experience narrative told by M (Mega). M has just told of an incident in which she saw an acquaintance looking through her (Mega’s) wallet. Later, she noticed she was missing some money, and assumed that her friend had stolen it. Adit is questioning her about this, suggesting that maybe her friend really didn’t steal the money. She is presenting a hypothetical example here, an instance of someone with another’s wallet in their hand, which would contradict M’s conclusions. Misalnya ‘say/for example’ frames the rest of D’s utterance in terms of a hypothetical instance of the local discourse topic (a friend with the speaker’s wallet in her hand), thus indicating its relevance for the ongoing interaction. Following is another example. This illustrates a frequent collocation in the database of misalnya ‘say/for example’ being prefaced with kalau ‘if ’. Of the 89 tokens in the database of misalnya ‘say/for example’, 43 (or just under half) cooccur in a clause with kalau ‘if ’. Susanna Cumming (personal communication) has suggested to me that this use of misalnya ‘say/for example’ serves to indicate that kalau ‘if ’ should be interpreted as introducing a hypothetical clause rather than a simple future clause. I.e. kalau misalnya ‘if, say’ corresponds with the English adverbial conjunction ‘if ’, while kalau alone would correspond to the English adverbial conjunction ‘when’ in its future sense. Evidence from the database suggests the plausibility of this analysis, but further discussion lies outside the scope of the present study. (55) (“Muram” IU 74–75) 74 kalau misalnya mau datang dalam pameran itu, if example-nya want come inside exhibition that.dem 75 … telpon dulu. telephone first “If, say, you want to go to the (art) exhibition, call first.”
In this example, the speaker is relating a recent discussion he had taken part in with an art student. The art student has put together an exhibition, and is inviting people to look at it. The word misalnya ‘say/for example’ frames the clause in terms of hypothetical modality. If the clause had simply been kalau mau datang, without misalnya, it would correspond to a definite future “when
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you want to come”, rather than the hypothetical implied currently. As with other epistemic -nya constructions surveyed in this section, the position of misalnya ‘say/for example’ is variable within the clause, again suggesting it is an adverb. The following three examples are illustrative. (56) (“Pencuri” IU 2438–2440) 2438 D: kalau pergi gitu lho misalnya, if go thus prt example-nya 2439 kalau pergi itu, if go that.dem 2440 duitnya disimpan di mana. money-nya pt-store at where “If you’re going somewhere, say, if you’re going somewhere, where do you keep your money?” (57) (“Dingdong” IU 49–50) 49 … misalnya lu kerja ya, example-nya 2sg work prt 50 dari jam satu sampai jam= .. lima. from hour one until hour five “Say you work from one o’clock until five o’clock.” (58) (“Tanya-Jawab” IU 1991) .. Kalau kemudian anda misalnya berdoa, if then 2sg example-nya mid-pray “If then, say you pray:…”
Further evidence that these epistemic -nya constructions have grammaticized from nominalizations into adverbs comes from the few tokens which illustrate the synchronic occurrence of both forms. For instance, there are three occurrences of intinya ‘gist+nya’ in the database which function as epistemic framing devices to indicate interactional relevance. At the same time, there is also one token of intinya ‘gist+nya’ in the database which occurs as an identifiable NP functioning as the object of a verb. The following two examples illustrate this contrast. (59) (“Pencuri” IU 994) intinya dia malam itu nggak bisa nemui saudaranya itu. gist-nya 3sg night that neg can at-meet-app sibling-nya that.dem “The gist of it was that he couldn’t meet his brother that night.” (60) (“Pencuri” IU 3417–3418) 3417 meringkas mah. at-summary prt
Epistemic -nya constructions
3418 Sampai dapatin intinya lho. until get-app gist-nya prt “I’m writing a summary so that I get the gist.”
In (59), the speaker is recounting a narrative told to her by a third party. She uses intinya ‘essence/gist’ as a framing device to indicate the point of the narrative which is relevant for the present interaction. In (60) on the other hand, the speaker uses intinya ‘essence/gist’ as an identifiable NP. The speaker is explaining how she is going about studying for her finals: she is outlining the chapter she is reading in order to get the intinya ‘main points’. In this example, intinya ‘essence/gist’ functions as the object of dapat ‘get’, and is not an epistemic framing device. Thus these two examples show the synchronic cooccurrence of both the adverbial and the nominal functions of -nya. Another feature of epistemic -nya constructions is their ability to co-occur within a single clause. The following example contains an instance of pokoknya ‘the thing is’, used to indicate the speaker’s assessment of interactional relevance, along with an instance of kayaknya ‘it seems’, to indicate the general evidential nature of the utterance. (61) (“Wisuda” IU 1443) Pokoknya berat itu lho kayaknya. main-nya heavy that.dem prt seem-nya “The thing is, that seems really difficult.”
This example demonstrates that more than one epistemic -nya can be used to frame the same utterance.
5.4 Discussion and implications In the previous three subsections, I have illustrated the use of -nya as a framing device. A CTP suffixed with -nya is embedded as an adverbial element within a clause, and functions to frame that clause in terms of epistemic modality. This epistemic framing can roughly be divided into three subcategories: evidentiality (expressing the speaker’s mode of knowledge for an utterance), mental/emotional attitude (expressing the speaker’s epistemic stance toward an utterance), and assessment of interactional relevance (characterizing the speaker’s attitude toward the relevance of the utterance for the ongoing interaction). These constructions are formally very different from traditional complements, but functionally very similar.
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The functional similarities between these constructions and grammatical complements are essentially based on two factors: the semantic classes of the stems which are suffixed with -nya, and the uses of these constructions to provide epistemic framing for a clause. Semantically, the stems of these constructions fall into classes of cognition, utterance, perception, and evaluation. These types of meanings are those which tend to be expressed as CTPs (cf. Noonan 1985, Givón 2001b, Dixon 1995). Functionally, the kinds of modality expressed by these constructions are also similar to the types of modality traditionally attributed to complements (cf. Ransom 1986; Thompson and Mulac 1991a, 1991b; Frajzyngier 1995; Thompson 2002), and its function to provide conceptual framing/background for a clause are similar to some of the features of complements noted by Langacker (1999). Formally, these constructions are clearly not traditional complements. Rather than a framing element (CTP) taking another clause as “subordinate”, in this case it is the framing element (pseudo-CTP) which is itself embedded into the framed clause as an adverb. Although, as previously demonstrated by Thompson and Mulac (1991a, 1991b) and Thompson (2002), traditional CTPs can also behave as epistemic adverbs, and so perhaps this situation is not as unusual as it might seem from first glance. It is certainly not my intent in this chapter to claim that epistemic -nya constructions are instances of grammatical complementation in Indonesian. Rather, I suggest that they are actually instances of what Dixon (1995) calls a ‘complementation strategy’ — a grammatical reflection of the conceptual link between a “primary-B” concept (e.g. ‘say’, ‘think’, ‘feel’, ‘fear’, ‘be fortunate’, ‘seem’, etc.) and the other predicate to which it is conceptually linked. As such, it is an additional strategy beyond those described by Dixon, since, in this case, it is the “primary-B” concept which is “subordinated” rather than the predicate to which it relates. In conclusion, this chapter is a first step in the description of the diversity of structures a language can employ for expressing concepts of framing and epistemicity. The occurrence of epistemic -nya constructions are readily observable in colloquial Indonesian discourse. One of the reasons I believe they have not previously been described in the literature is the lack of attention that has of yet been paid to this variety of Indonesian and mode of language use.
Chapter 6
Conclusion
I began by characterizing this book as a study in the dynamics of linguistic categorization from a discourse-functional perspective. I have examined a particular linguistic category to determine whether it is realized in a specific language — complementation in colloquial Indonesian — and through a close analysis of a conversational corpus, I have argued that complementation is in fact not a viable linguistic category in this language variety. Each of the preceding four chapters (Chapters 2–5) has dealt with a specific type of construction which can express what can be encoded in other languages by complementation: juxtaposed clauses, clauses introduced by the putative complementizer bahwa, verbs in series, and the epistemic -nya construction. I have argued in each chapter that the colloquial Indonesian data provides no evidence that these structures are complements; i.e. there is no evidence of one clause being an argument of another clause. Complementation is not grammaticized in this language variety, despite the semantic similarity of these constructions to complements in other languages. Now that we have thoroughly examined the issues surrounding complementation in colloquial Indonesian, this final chapter will focus briefly on general methodological and theoretical implications suggested by the results of this study: what does it mean to be a linguistic category, and why is a discourse-functional approach to language crucial in addressing this issue? A skeptical reader may wonder whether this study isn’t simply a debate over terminology — a squabble over labels. One primary objection to this work would be that the definition of complementation is too narrow; instead of insisting that complements be defined based on morphosyntax, an alternative approach would be to adopt a pragmatically- and/or semantically-based, functional definition. This would presumably have the advantage of crosslinguistic applicability: a redefinition of complementation as a semantic/ pragmatic relationship, rather than a grammatical category, would take care of the very situation I have described here — a language like colloquial Indonesian which does not have morphosyntactic complementation, but in which speakers
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nonetheless seem able to express the concepts which are grammaticized as complements in other languages. Adopting a non-structural definition of complementation, then, would allow the comparison of functionally-similar constructions across languages, regardless of their grammatical status. However, I do not endorse this approach, for at least three significant reasons. First, ‘the concepts which are grammaticized as complements in other languages’ is not an intrinsically unified category. To my mind, there is no functional characterization which would unite all of the Indonesian constructions discussed in this book, and it is unclear what ontological justification would merit positing a functional category which speakers of a language show no evidence of recognizing and orienting to. This redefinition would impose semantic/pragmatic categories from one language onto another language, regardless of whether or not these categories are even relevant in the target language. Secondly, as of yet, there is no semantic/pragmatic definition or characterization of complementation which adequately addresses the range of functions and meanings found in naturally-occurring conversational language (cf. 2.4.1–2.4.2 for a discussion of some of the shortcomings of semantic characterizations of complementation when applied to interactional data.) Of course this does not mean that an adequate, unified, functional characterization would be impossible, but simply that none exists as of yet, and no attempt has yet succeeded when approaching this question from an in-depth study of complements in naturally-occurring data from language-in-use. Thirdly, and most importantly, a redefinition of complementation as a functional category would obscure the fact that, in many languages, grammatical structures do exist in which one clause occurs as an argument of another. Complementation is in fact a structural reality in many languages, which a redefinition of this term would fail to recognize. Rather than redefining complementation as a semantic/pragmatic relationship, thereby ignoring grammatical structure, it should continue to be used for the grammatical situation it has traditionally described. But it is equally crucial to recognize this as a language-particular and typologically variable category, and not as a universal. As the present study demonstrates, the claim that complementation is a universal category falls short when confronted with a corpus of naturally-occurring Indonesian conversation. Complementation, then, is a term which is useful for describing a linguistic structure found in many, but by no means all, languages. What has been illustrated in this book is that linguistic categories, as demonstrated by the lack of complementation in colloquial Indonesian, need to be argued for and justified on a language-particular basis. It is unwarranted to assume that what is encoded by a linguistic structure in one language will be
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expressed by a similar structure in another language, or in fact to assume that it will be grammatically encoded at all. This book has argued against an overlystructural approach to grammar, but it should not be interpreted as a denial of structure. Rather, I would argue for a realistic view of what grammar is: linguistic structures need to be understood and treated as language particular, not language universal. This point has been made by Croft (2001) who argues for a conception of grammar as language- and construction-specific. Dryer (1997) has also argued strongly in favor of treating linguistic categories as language-particular, and against treating them as cross-linguistic realities. Dryer’s discussion focuses specifically on grammatical relations, but the same could be said of complementation: The temptation that has led linguists in the past to posit structure in a crosslinguistic sense is driven precisely by the high degree of similarity among structures in different languages, a degree of similarity that leads to using the same labels for similar structures in different languages and eventually to the replication of these labels as labels for some unified crosslinguistic phenomenon. But, once we recognize that the similarities that lead to these labels are themselves simply the reflection of high degrees of isomorphism between different structures and a given function, then the need for positing crosslinguistic structures should evaporate. (Dryer 1997: 137)
Similarly, I would claim that ‘complementation’ is a useful label to describe the relationship that exists in many languages between a semantic/pragmatic situation such as framing and epistemicity, and the syntactic situation of one clause serving as an argument of another. But this term should not be extended to languages in which these relationships are not encoded grammatically; and, as such, complementation is a language-particular structure which varies in its manifestation and scope from one language to the next. The results of this study reaffirm that linguistic categories must be justified ‘from the bottom up’, as language-particular structures. Categories cannot be assumed to exist, but justification for structure must proceed from observed morphosyntactic patterns. As pointed out in Chapter 1, this has been the standard practice of linguists regarding morphological categories such as number and tense — linguistic categories like ‘plural’ or ‘past tense’ are posited based on morphological marking, not on the ability of speakers to conceptualize or express these ideas in other ways. The colloquial Indonesian data demand that the cross-linguistic variability of morphosyntactic structures be recognized for the grammar of clause-combining as well. The ability of speakers to express semantic concepts (like framing and epistemicity) does not in and of itself
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indicate that the grammar of a language utilizes complementation. Meaning and structure are not universally isomorphic; meanings or functions which are grammaticized in one language may not be grammaticized in another. For example, as discussed in Chapter 2, it is unwarranted to assume, because colloquial Indonesian uses juxtaposed clauses to express the concepts which some languages express by complementation, that juxtaposition is a signal of complementation. Rather, Indonesian juxtaposed clauses illustrate a wide variety of interclausal relations, and, as such, it is indefensible to claim that juxtaposition is a grammatical signal of anything beyond the two clauses being somehow related. The exact nature of that relationship is left to inference. This study also illustrates the danger of bringing structural assumptions from one language and applying them to another. For instance, if a linguist approaches serial verbs with the assumption that a single clause must have a single predicate, then it is easy to assume that the serial verbs discussed in Chapter 4 would be complements — the first verb taking the second verb as an argument. If, however, the linguist recognizes that the notion of one predicate per clause is not a structural universal, then Indonesian serial verbs are readily analyzable as monoclausal structures with a complex predicate, which then better accounts for other structural aspects of Indonesian serial verbs. The necessity of using naturally-occurring discourse data to investigate linguistic categories is demonstrated in two crucial ways in this study. First, a close analysis of a structure within its contexts of use brings crucial insight into the functions of that structure which would not be gained from a focus on individual, decontextualized sentences. As illustrated in Chapter 3, at first glance the word bahwa looks suspiciously like a complementizer, occurring between main and complement clauses. However, a thorough analysis of bahwa reveals facts about this lexeme which would not otherwise be known: its distribution is limited to formal genres of Indonesian; it not only introduces material after verbs, but also occurs after nouns; and it introduces unframed material as well. Viewed in its full contexts of use, bahwa is actually an instance of a discourse marker, reflecting larger, text-structuring functions. Secondly, an analysis of naturally-occurring discourse brings to light constructions which may otherwise go unnoticed. Such is the case with the epistemic -nya construction discussed in Chapter 5. Mine is the first study to characterize and describe this construction, and to note the functional similarities between epistemic -nya constructions and complementation in other languages, suggesting that it is in fact a ‘complementation strategy’. One of the reasons this construction has previously gone unnoticed is undoubtedly the lack of attention paid to this
Conclusion
variety of Indonesian and mode of language use. In conclusion, the lack of evidence for complementation in colloquial Indonesian provides insight into the nature of linguistic categories in general. Linguistic categories are best understood as language-particular and diverse, and are best analyzed within their occurrence in natural discourse. A full understanding of the range and diversity of the categories of grammar requires thorough, discourse-based studies of how structures are realized in particular languages, by speakers in everyday interaction.
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Appendices
Appendix A: Abbreviations and Glosses Unless relevant for the discussion at hand, I have generally not provided full morphemic glosses. E.g. I have not indicated nominalizing affixes, since they are not relevant for the present study. 1sg, 2sg, 3sg, 1pl, 2pl, 3pl 1pl.x advers aff app at cl cop dem ex mid neg nonvol nya ord prog prt pt purp redup rel trunc
first, second, and third person, singular and plural
first-person plural, excluding addressee: kami adversative: ke- -an circumfix affirmative backchannel: ho-o applicative suffix: -i, -kan, or -in Agent-Trigger prefix: N- or meNnoun classifier copula: adalah demonstrative existential morpheme: ada middle prefix: bernegative morpheme nonvolitional prefix: ter-nya suffix (definite, possessive, and other functions) prefix on ordinal numerals: keprogressive aspect morpheme: lagi, sedang discourse particle Patient-Trigger prefix: dipurposive conjunction: agar, untuk reduplication “relative clause” marker: yang truncated word
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Appendix B: Summary of Transcription Conventions (Adapted from Du Bois et al. 1992, 1993) Each transcript line represents a single Intonation Unit. Speaker labels appear in uppercase, and are followed by a colon. Simultaneous speech is indicated by square brackets [ ] (not aligned because of glossing difficulty). Material in angle-brackets · Ò is codeswitching, usually Javanese, English, or Arabic. . , ? — @ % = .. … (TSK) (H)
Final intonation contour. Continuing intonation contour. Appeal intonation contour. Truncated Intonation Unit. Truncated word. One pulse of laughter. Glottal stop. Prosodic lengthening. Short pause. Long pause. Tongue click. In-breath.
Name index A Abas, Husen, 4 Achard, Michel, 24 Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y., 129, 130, 148, 149 Alsina, Alex, 148, 149 Alwi, Hasan, 13, 75, 145 B Biber, Douglas, 96, 97 Bresnan, Joan, 148, 149 Bybee, Joan L., 3, 142, 143 C Chaer, Abdul, 13, 145 Chafe, Wallace L., 1, 5, 6, 51, 57, 161, 163 Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, 1 Croft, William, 51, 52, 189 Cumming, Susanna, 1, 6, 7, 17, 18, 19, 20, 67, 68, 69, 133, 174, 183 D Dardjowidjojo, Soenjono, 13, 75, 145 de Casparis, J. G., 124 Dixon, R. M. W., 2, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 35, 61, 153, 154, 155, 186 Dryer, Matthew S., 69, 189 Du Bois, John W., 2, 6, 161, 162, 166 Durie, Mark, 129, 137 E Echols, John M., 72, 75, 86, 134 Englebretson, Robert, 2, 20, 67, 68, 69, 133 Errington, J. Joseph, 9 Ewing, Michael C., 2, 5, 20, 161, 162, 165
F Felser, Claudia, 21 Fincke, Steven, 2 Finegan, Edward, 96, 97 Foley, William, 130, 139, 148, 149 Ford, Cecilia E., 1, 2, 5, 51, 54 Fox, Barbara A., 1, 2, 5, 51, 54 Frajzyngier, Zygmunt, 26, 28, 155, 186 G Geest, W., 21 Givón, Talmy, 1, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 37, 38, 51, 61, 66, 69, 70, 108, 136, 148, 179, 186 Greenbaum, S., 32 Grice, H. Paul, 37 Grijns, C. D., 10 H Halliday, M. A. K., 37, 40, 46, 62, 94, 101, 102, 108 Helasvuo, Marja-Liisa, 2 Hopper, Paul J., 1, 2, 89 Hudson, Richard, 94, 95 I Indiyastini, Titik, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34 J Jaspers, Dany, 21 Jefferson, Gail, 5 K Kärkkäinen, Elise, 172 Klooster, Wim, 21
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L Langacker, Ronald W., 23, 24, 27, 28, 60, 62, 63, 186 Laury, Ritva, 2 Leech, G., 32 Lenk, Uta, 123, 124, 125 M Mann, William C., 37 Moeliono, Anton M., 13, 75, 145 Mulac, Anthony, 26, 27, 28, 63, 186 Munro, Pamela, 81 N Niedzielski, Nancy A., 11 Noonan, Michael, 2, 21, 22, 26, 27, 28, 37, 66, 69, 70, 94, 127, 128, 147, 186 O Olson, Mike, 130, 139, 148, 149 Ono, Tsuyoshi, 1, 5, 51, 57, 58, 63, 155 P Pagliuca, William, 143 Palmer, Frank R., 172 Paolino, Danae, 6 Park, Joseph Sung-Yul, 51, 52 Perkins, Revere, 143 Poedjosoedarmo, Soepomo, 10, 11 Preston, Dennis R., 11 Prince, Ellen F., 161, 162 Putseys, Yvan, 21 Q Quirk, Randolph, 32
R Ransom, Evelyn, 25, 26, 28, 155, 186 Rosenbaum, Peter S., 21, 29 S Sacks, Harvey, 5 Schegloff, Emanuel, 5, 12 Schuetze-Coburn, Stephan, 6, 51 Sells, Peter, 148, 149 Selting, Margaret, 1 Seuren, Pieter, 21 Shadily, Hassan, 72, 75, 86, 134 Shapley, Marian, 6 Sneddon, James N., 13, 17, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 62, 64, 65, 70, 71, 73, 75, 94, 100, 126, 145, 159, 165 Sperber, Dan, 37 Sugono, Dendi, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34 Svartvik, J., 32 T Thompson, Sandra A., 1, 2, 5, 6, 26, 27, 28, 37, 51, 54, 57, 58, 63, 141, 155, 161, 162, 166, 186 V Verhaar, John W. M., 13 W Weber, Elizabeth, 6 Wilson, Deirdre, 37 Wolff, John U., 13, 75, 94, 145 Wouk, Fay, 10, 15, 17, 18
Subject index A activation cost, 163 adjectives, 16 adverbs, 3, 170–171, 174–175, 177–178, 184 applicative, 20, 68, 70, 77, 79, 82–87 aspect, 3, 13, 143 auxiliaries, 13, 143–145 B binding hierarchy, 22–23, 27, 61, 108, 136 borrowings, 120 C collocation, 110 complementation and modality, 25–28 as an emergent phenomenon, 88–90 definition of, 2, 21–22, 29, 66, 187–188 in conversational English, 26–28, 63 in Indonesian linguistics, 27–34 prosody of, 51, 57 semantics of, 22–25, 60 structural characteristics of, 4, 22–23, 25, 66, 94 universality of, 2, 22, 24–25, 27–28, 188 complementation strategies, 2, 24–25, 28, 153–155, 178, 186 complementizers, 22–23, 25–28, 37, 66, 93–95, 99, 108 complement-taking predicates (CTPs), 22–23, 26–27, 61, 108, 136, 176, 178, 186 complex predicates, 148–149 conceptual subordination, 24, 62–63
constituent order, 67, 69 conversational language, 4–5, 12 copula, 17, 97 D discourse coherence, 37–38, 123–124 discourse marker, 123–125 E epistemicity, 23, 26–28, 57, 63, 108, 172 event integration, 22–23, 27 evidentiality, 172–178 F framed instantiations definition of, 39 and larger discourse units, 40–44 distribution of prosodic types, 53 order of clauses, 44–45, 66 functionalism Cognitive Grammar, 23–24, 63 discourse-functional linguistics, 1, 12 interactional linguistics, 1 G generative linguistics, 21 grammar and discourse. See functionalism grammaticization, 5, 13, 26–28, 143–145, 170, 184 I iconicity, 22–23, 48, 51, 138 identifiability, 161–168 increments, 51, 53–54, 104–105, 118 Indonesian colloquial, 10–12, 18
204 Searching for Structure
descriptive/pedagogical grammars of, 13 formal, 8, 10, 19, 98 historical background of, 4, 11 language attitudes about, 5, 9, 11–12, 76–77, 98 morphology, 13 sociolinguistic situation of, 4–5, 9, 11 Intonation Unit, 6, 51 intransitive report verbs, 70–71 J Jakartanese. See Indonesian: colloquial Javanese, 8–10, 161–162 juxtaposed clauses as adversatives, 46–47 as concessives, 48 as conditionalss, 47 as framed instantiations, 39–42, 44, 46 definition of, 37–38 multifaceted relations, 45–46, 48–50 temporally sequenced, 48 L language contact, 10, 18 linguistic categories, 2, 187–191 M methodology. See also speech events coding, 7 elicitation, 6, 12, 71, 75–77 glossing, 6, 16 labeling of examples, 9 recording, 5–6 transcription, 5–6, 10 modality, 13, 26, 144, 186 N negation, 14 nominalization, 168, 184 noun phrases, 15 -nya: frequency of, 157
P particles, 15 possession, 157–161 prefixes intransitive verbal, 16 transitive verbal, 17, 97, See also trigger projections, 40, 62, 101 pronouns, 15 prosody and information content, 58 and lexical weight, 55–57 and new information, 57 and online planning, 58–59 prosody and grammar, 51, 55 Pusat Pembinaan Dan Pengembangan Bahasa, 11, 31, 77 Q quotatives, 172–175 R reduced complements, 127–128 referent tracking, 165–166 registers, 96–99 reported speech, 45, 62, 81, 105–106, 119 S Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, 6 serial verbs, 38, 128 and argument sharing, 130–133 and trigger, 133–135 as causation, 138–139 as coordinated action, 139 as manner, 137 as purpose, 137–138 as temporal sequence, 137–138 definition of, 128–129 prosody of, 130 with conjunctions, 140–142 speech events description of, 8–9 ethnographic information, 7, 9
Subject index 205
statistical information about, 7 subject complements, 68–69, 110 suffixes transitive verbal, 20, see also applicative T tense, 3, 66 trigger, 17–18, 67, 69, 77 agent-trigger, 18, 67 and constituent order, 67 indeterminate, 20, 67–68, 78–79, 134 patient-trigger, 19, 67–68, 77, 112 status of themes and recipients, 78–82 unprefixed, 20, 70–75 with proclitic agents, 145–146
V voice. See trigger Z zero anaphora, 15, 19, 104
In the series STUDIES IN DISCOURSE AND GRAMMAR (SiDaG) the following titles have been published: 1. GELUYKENS, Ronald: From Discourse Process to Grammatical Construction: On Left-Dislocation in English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1992. 2. IWASAKI, Shoichi: Subjectivity in Grammar and Discourse: Theoretical Considerations and a Case Study of Japanese Spoken Discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1993. 3. WEBER, Elizabeth G.: Varieties of Questions in English Conversation. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, 1993. 4. DOWNING, Pamela: Numerical Classifier Systems: The Case of Japanese. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1996. 5. TAO, Hongyin: Units in Mandarin Conversation: Prosody, Discourse, and Grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1996. 6. DORGELOH, Heidrun: Inversion in Modern English: Form and function. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, 1997. 7. LAURY, Ritva: Demonstratives in Interaction. The emergence of a definite article in Finnish. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1997. 8. MORI, Junko: Negotiating Agreement and Disagreement in Japanese. Connective expressions and turn construction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1999. 9. HELASVUO, Marja-Liisa: Syntax in the making: The emergence of syntactic units in Finnish conversation. Amsterdam/Philadelpia, 2001. 10. SELTING, Margret and Elizabeth COUPER-KUHLEN (eds.): Studies in Interactional Linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelpia, 2001. 11. SCHEIBMAN, Joanne: Point of View and Grammar. Structural patterns of subjectivity in American English conversation. Amsterdam/Philadelpia, 2002. 12. HAYASHI, Makoto: Joint Utterance Construction in Japanese Conversation. Amsterdam/Philadelpia, 2003. 13. ENGLEBRETSON, ROBERT: Searching for Structure. The problem of complementation in colloquial Indonesian conversation. Amsterdam/Philadelpia, 2003. 14. DU BOIS, John W., Lorraine E. KUMPF and William J. ASHBY (eds.): Preferred Argument Structure. Grammar as architecture for function. Amsterdam/Philadelpia, n.y.p.
