097 Research Paper12

8/9/2019 097 Research Paper12

1/20

Voice in Colloquial Malay Relatives*

Hiroki Nomoto

(Graduate School, National University of Singapore/Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

)

1. Introduction

Voice has long been one of the most popular issues among Malay/Indonesian linguists in the world.

This is because the voice system of Malay/Indonesian, like those of many other Austronesian

languages, is not a simple bipolar opposition between the active and the passive. Unlike other

Austronesian languages such as Tagalog and Malagasy, the fact is not so obvious in

Malay/Indonesian that it has been described as a simple active-passive opposition from time to

time.

As a result of the recent trend of emphasising sociolinguistic factors in Malay/Indonesian

linguistics, combined with strong descriptivism, considerable attention began to be paid to

colloquial and regional varieties of the language as well as written and standard varieties. Cole et al.

(2006) is one of the studies done in such a spirit. They studied Jakarta Indonesian, the colloquial

variety of Indonesian which is normally spoken by the population of Jakarta in the course of their

daily lives (Wouk 1989), and found a different voice system from that of Standard Indonesian.

Specifically, they concluded that a type of passive called Passive 2 (P2) in the literature on

Standard Indonesian does not exist in Jakarta Indonesian.

The present study is modelled after Cole et al. (2006) and discusses the voice system of

Colloquial Malay, which is the colloquial variety of the Malay language spoken in Malaysia1.

Although both simple clauses and relative clauses are examined in Cole et al. (2006), the present

study only deals with the latter. I will examine which voice is employed in the relative clauses

found in a corpus of Colloquial Malay and conclude that P2 (or bare passive in the term used in

section 2 and the sections thereafter) does not exist in Colloquial Malay either.

* I would like to thank Isamu Shoho, Osamu Hieda and Untung Yuwono for their helpful comments. Thanks also go toSaiful Bahari bin Ahmad and Nadiah Hanim for their assistance as my informants. I am grateful to Terence Seah for

checking my English.The following abbreviations are used in this paper. A: adjective; ADV: adverb; Ag: agent; AUX: auxiliary; COMP:

complementiser; e: empty; FUT: future; INT: interjection; N: noun; NEG: negation; Op: null operator; P: preposition; PART:particle; PERF: perfect; PROG: progressive; t: trace; V: verb; Vi: intransitive verb; XP: maximal projection of X.1 For a more detailed description of Colloquial Malay, see Nomoto (2006b, section 2.1). But one point must be noted here.

That is, the opposition of Colloquial Malay versus Written Malay is based on the degree of formality, with the former beingless formal than the latter. The names indicate the type of communication in which they are primarily used. Alternatively,they can be called Informal/Low Malay and Formal/High Malay, respectively.


2/20

The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. Section 2 is a brief introduction to the

voice system of Malay/Indonesian. Section 3 explains the methodology of the study. The results are

shown and analysed in section 4. Section 5 is the conclusion.

2. Malay/Indonesian voice system

Voskuil (2000) classifies Indonesian voice into four categories: morphological active,

morphological passive, bare active and bare passive. The situation is the same in Malay.

(1) a. Morphological active

Dia sudah mem-baca buku itu.

she PERF MEN-read book that

She has already read the book.

b. Morphological passive

Buku itu di-baca (oleh)-nya.

book that DI-read (by)-her

The book is read by her.

c. Bare active

Dia sudah baca buku itu.

she PERF read book that

She has read the book.

d. Bare passive

Buku itu sudah dia baca.

book that PERF she read

She has already read the book.

Morphological active and passive are characterised by the prefixes meN- and di-, respectively. Bare

active and passive are different in word order, specifically that of agent and

auxiliary/negation/adverb. The agent precedes auxiliary/negation/adverb in the former, while in the

latter no element can intervene between the agent and the verb stem. The position of the theme

argument is not relevant in distinguishing passive from active since it can also appear after the verb.

Thus, (1b) and (1d) allow the following variants, respectively: dibacanya buku ituand sudah dia

baca buku itu.

A variety of terminologies are used in the literature to refer to one or more of the four voices

shown above. Table 1 (p. 97) summarises some of them. In Table 1, two alternative names shown in

italics, namely bentuk persona/ninshoukei [personal form] and object preposing, appear twice,

which means that these two categories subsume two voices which are treated as distinct in the

present study and others.


3/20

Let us look at the latter first. Chung (1976b) claims that the following two sentences, which are

a bare active (2a) and a bare passive sentence (2b) in the terminology of the present study, represent

the same one construction Object Preposing.

Table 1. Variety of terminologies for Malay/Indonesian voices

Present paper Pattern Alternative names

morphological

active

Ag meN-V aktif jati2 [genuine active] (Asmah 1980)

morphological

passive

di-V (oleh) Ag passive type 1 (P1) (Dardjowidjojo 1978 among others),

pasif jati [genuine passive] (Asmah 1980), di- passive

(Yeoh 1979), canonical passive (Chung 1976b;

Guilfoyle et al. 1992); bentuk persona/ninshoukei

[personal form](Shoho 1998)

bare active Ag AUX/NEG/ADVV aktif semu [superficial active] (Asmah 1980), stem

sentences (Chung 1978); object preposing (Chung

1976a, b, 1978)

bare passive AUX/NEG/ADVAg V passive type 2 (P2) (Dardjowidjojo 1978 among others),

pasif semu [superficial passive] (Asmah 1980 among

others), pronoun passive (Nik Safiah 1975), 1st and 2nd

person passive (Yeoh 1979), de-voiced transitive

(Cartier 1979), ergative (Cartier 1979), subjective

passive (Guilfoyle et al. 1992); object preposing(Chung

1976a, b. 1978), bentuk persona/ninshoukei [personal

form](Shoho 1998)

(2) a. Orang lelaki itu saya akan bunuh.

man male the I FUT kill

Im going to kill that man./That man, Im going to kill.

b. Mobil itu dapat kita perbaiki.

car the can we repair.

We can repair the car./The car, we can repair.

(Chung 1976b: (3c) and (4))

In (2a) the agent saya I precedes the auxiliary akan will, hence it is a bare active sentence. In

(2b) the order of the relevant two elements is the reverse. The auxiliary dapat can precedes the

agent kita we, hence it is a bare passive sentence. These two sentences both involve the

2 To be precise, the original definition of aktif jatiby Asmah is as follows: (i) the verb contains the prefix meN- and (ii) iftransitive, the object can be passivised using the verb prefixed by di-. See Asmah (1980: 88-89, 349).


4/20

movement of the underlying postverbal direct object to the beginning of the clause. With regard to

the difference in word order between the two, Chung posits an optional cliticisation of the

underlying subject (i.e. the agent) to the verb. Thus, in (2b), kitawe is analysed to be cliticised to

the verbperbaikito repair.

In my understanding, bentuk persona/ninshoukei [personal form] is virtually the same as the

passive in prescriptive grammars such as Tatabahasa Dewan(Nik Safiah et al. 1993). The alleged

evidence for the category is that the distribution of bare passive and morphological passive is

complementary. Bare passive is used for first and second person agents and morphological passive

for third person agents. The proponents of bentuk persona (and prescriptive passive) often invoke

the synchronic resemblance between the prefix di- and the third person singular pronoun dia, which

in turn appears to verify their hypothesis that the two are diachronically the same one thing. The

issue of the historical origin of the prefix di- set aside, however, synchronically there are several

syntactic and semantic differences between morphological and bare passive. For example, only the

agent of bare passive, but not that of morphological passive, can serve as the controller (3) and a

binder of the reflexivesendiriself (4).

(3) a. *Kereta itu di-larikan oleh Alii untuk ei mencuba-nya.

car the DI-drive by Ali for test-it

The car was driven by Ali so he could test it.

b. Kereta itu sayai larikan untuk ei mencuba-nya.

car the I drive for test-it

The car, I drove so I could test it.

(Alsagoff 1992: 63)

(4) a. Doktor itui di-usik oleh Alij di rumah sendirii/*j.

doctor the DI-tease by Ali in house self

The doctoriwas teased by Alijin selfsi/*jhouse.

b. Doktor ituj Alii usik di rumah sendirii/j.

doctor the Ali tease in house self

Aliiteased the doctorjin selfsi/jhouse.

(Alsagoff 1992: 76)

What is more, the alleged complementary distribution is actually no more than an ideal. Bare

passive is not restricted to first and second person agents. Morphological passive is mostly used for

third person agents, but it can also be used for first and second person agents as long as certain

semantic/pragmatic conditions are met. These facts have been repeatedly pointed out for as long as

some forty years (Abdul Hamid 1992: 10-12). Surprisingly, according to Shibata (1992), the

equivalent of di-tulis saya written by me dates back to as early as A.D. 686 in Kota Kapur

Inscription as ni-galar-ku (di-, ni-: passive marker; tulis, galar: to write; saya, -ku: me/my). The


5/20

present study will provide further evidence against the category bentuk personaand prescriptive

passive.

To sum up, there are four categories of voice in Malay. However, two points must be noted here.

Firstly, the classification is based on the data of Written Malay and it is not necessarily the case that

the same classification is true with Colloquial Malay. Recall the claim by Cole et al. (2006) that

Jakarta Indonesian, the colloquial variety of Indonesian, lacks bare passive, which is a very

productive pattern in Standard Written Indonesian. Secondly, in actual language use, it is often the

case that one pattern is more favoured than the other(s). In other words, the frequency of one

pattern may differ from those of the others to a significant extent. Now, the problems are: (i) which

of the four voices shown above are possible at all in Colloquial Malay? and (ii) what is the

frequency of each possible voice? This paper attempts to answer these questions by examining the

relative clauses found in a corpus of Colloquial Malay.

3. Methodology

3.1 Corpus

The corpus used in the present study is a corpus built by a research project at Tokyo University of

Foreign Studies (21st Century Centre of Excellence Programme: Usage-Based Linguistic

Informatics), which I participated in. The official name of this corpus is Multilingual Corpora

(Malay), though I have used a simpler name UKM Corpus in my past works (Nomoto 2006a, b).

The corpus was made in cooperation with Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM). It consists of

32 sessions of casual conversation between two university students each time. 20 students are

involved. The total recording time is approximately 30.5 hours. 22 of the 32 dialogues have been

transcribed. The total word count is 172,855 words, including a small number of recurrent tags.

Visit the following website for more information about the corpus:

http://www.coelang.tufs.ac.jp/multilingual_corpus/ms/ (accessed 15/09/2006).

The data in the following sections are all from this corpus unless otherwise indicated.

3.2 Design of the examination

This section explains how the examination into the above-mentioned corpus was made.

I searched the corpus for the relative clauses with the complementiser yangplus gap in which

either the external or internal argument (i.e. underlying subject and object, respectively) of a

transitive verb is relativised. In what follows, I call the relativisation of the external and internal

argument subject relativisation and object relativisation, respectively, for ease of exposition.

There were about 2,500 instances ofyangin total. However, more than 2,000 instances of them

did not satisfy the present purpose and hence are excluded from the object of examination. They

include embedded complement clauses introduced by yang (5), relative clauses whose main


6/20

predicate is not a transitive verb (6), relative clauses with no gap (7) and the expression yang

-nya, which I consider to be an idiom meaning what is or to ones (8).

(5) Dia tak nak hidup sebab dia tau [yang dia akan buta].

he not want live because he know COMP he will blind

He didnt want to live because he knew that he would lose his sight.

(6) a. Bukan kucing yang [NP binatang] tu, nama-nya memang Kuching.3

not cat COMP animal that name-its indeed Kuching

Its not the animal, kucing (cat), but its name is indeed Kuching. (Kuching, is the

capital city of Sarawak)

b. kesan yang [AP buruk]

effect COMP bad

bad effects

c. hantu Jepun yang [PP kat Malaysia]

ghost Japan COMP in Malaysia

Japanese ghosts in Malaysia

d. orang yang [VP [Vi duduk] kat sini]

person COMP live in here

people living here

(7) a. fotostat yang [kita kena beli kad]

copy.machine COMP we have.to buy card

a copy machine which you have to buy a card to use it

b. hari yang [balik Kelantan]

day COMP return Kelantan

the day you returned to Kelantan

c. Apa yang [kau tak seronok]?

what COMP you not happy

What are the things that you are not happy with?

(8) So, hari tu dia ajak aku gi kampung dia, tapi yang masalah-nya, .

so day that she invite me go village her but YANG problem-NYA

So she invited me to visit her village (that day), but the problem was .

In addition, I excluded those relative clauses in which the non-relativised argument is null (9). In

the examples below, the null arguments are shown bypro.

3 In Colloquial Malay, NP predicates in relative clauses are very common in contrast to Written Malay, where they are sorestricted as to make some authors regard them ungrammatical.


7/20

(9) a. Cakap Kelantan? Apa Opi yang [pro nak cakap ti]?4

speak Kelantan what COMP want speak

Speak Kelantanese? What shall I say?

b. Kau se-orang je la kat Malaysia ni Opi yang [ti pakai pro], .

you one-person only PART in Malaysia this COMP wear

You are the only person in Malaysia who wears it.

Both subject and object relativisation allow more than one option depending on the selection of

voice. There are two options for subject relativisation: morphological active (10a) and bare active

(10b).

(10) a. orang Opi yang [ti sudah mem-baca buku itu] (morphological active; cf.(1a))

person COMP PERF MEN-read book that

the person who has already read the book

b. orang Opi yang [ti sudah baca buku itu] (bare active; cf. (1b))

person COMP PERF read book that

the person who has already read the book

Therefore, what must be investigated are: (i) whether both options are also available in Colloquial

Malay and (ii) the frequency of each option.

For object relativisation, there are three options: morphological passive (11a), bare active (11b)

and bare passive (11c).

(11) a. buku Opi yang [ti di-baca ti (oleh)-nya] (morphological passive; cf. (1b))

book COMP DI-read (by)-her

the book which is read by her

b. buku Opi yang [dia sudah baca ti]5

(bare active; cf. (1c))

book COMP she PERF read

the book which she has already read

c. buku Opi yang [ti sudah dia baca ti] (bare passive; cf. (1d))

book COMP PERF she read

the book which she has already read

4 This sentence cannot be bare passive, that is, theprocannot be between nakwant and cakapspeak (i.e. nakprocakap),for it is believed that the agent of bare passive is obligatory.5 Despite the long-lasting misconception that only (surface) subject is accessible to relativisation in Malay/Indonesian justas other Austronesian languages like Tagalog and Malagasy (Yeoh 1979: ch. 4; Comrie 1981: 150), direct object is in factrelativisable if the blocking by the prefix meN- (Saddy 1991) does not come into play (Chung 1976a; Musgrave 2001; Cole

& Hermon 2005; Nomoto 2006a). In relation to object relativisation, Hassal (2005) reports cases where the objects arerelativised even when they cross the prefix meN-. In such cases, the blocking effect seems not at work. Further research isneeded.


8/20

Therefore, what must be investigated are: (i) which options are available in Colloquial Malay and

(ii) the frequency of each option. Note here that a fourth category is needed to classify all the

instances that occur in the corpus: indeterminate. Recall that bare active and bare passive are

distinguished based on the relative position between the agent and auxiliary/negation/adverb. This

means that if the latter element is absent in a clause, that clause will be indeterminate between bare

active and bare passive. Thus, buku yang dia baca the book which he read can be analysed as

either bare active (12a) or bare passive (12b).

(12) a. buku Opi yang [dia baca ti]

book COMP he read

b. buku Opiyang [tidia baca ti]

The above are the points investigated by Cole et al. (2006) for Jakarta Indonesian. Moreover,

the present study also examines the person of the agent in object relativisation. Third person is

further divided into pronoun (Pro), non-pronoun (Non-Pro) and zero (). The agent of a

morphological passive sentence may not be expressed explicitly. By examining the person of the

agent, I will show that the complementary distribution mentioned in the second last paragraph of

section 2 is a fallacy (in Colloquial Malay as well).

4. Results and analysis

4.1 Subject relativisation

The result for subject relativisation is shown in Table 2.

Table 2. Voice choice in subject relativisation

Morphological active Bare active

63 122

It is obvious that both morphological and bare active are available in Colloquial Malay. In terms of

frequency, the approximate ratio of morphological and bare active is 1:2. Some authors describe

this feature of Colloquial Malay as the omission of the prefix meN- (e.g. Onozawa 1996: 226).

However, such a description relies on a false and, I think, unhealthy widespread assumption that the

colloquial variety is merely a simplified version of the written variety. If one is to study Colloquial

Malay in its own right6, it is more adequate to say that bare active is the unmarked voice in

6 Nomoto (2006b) stresses the importance of the study of Colloquial Malay in its own right by demonstrating how poorly arun-of-the-mill preposition kat in Colloquial Malay has been described and how it is worth a serious look. In Nomoto &

Tsuji (2006), we maintain that Written Malay and Colloquial Malay are two distinct varieties in diglossia. If thischaracterisation of ours is correct, it can be another reason why Colloquial Malay must be studied (, taught and learned)along with Written Malay.


9/20

Colloquial Malay and the prefix meN- can be added to bring about some additional effects such as

formality.

Below are some examples from the corpus, of morphological actives (13) and bare actives (14)

in subject relativisation.

(13) Morphological active

a. Biasanya siapa yang [me-lakukan samseng] ni?

usually who COMP MEN-do gangster] this

Who will be gangsters usually?

b. Sepatutnya ibu bapa dia yang [men-didik anak-anak],

rightfully mother father his/her COMP MEN-educate children

bukan dia yang [men-dera anak-anak].

not he/she COMP MEN-abuse children

The parents should be the ones who educate their children, not the ones who abuse

them.

(14) Bare active

a. Tapi tak semua yang [ambil dadah] tu nak hilangkan tekanan.

but not all COMP take drug that want lose pressure

But not all of those who take drugs want to relieve their stress.

b. Pakistan tu ramai yang [jual karpet], petang-petang datang tempat aku

Pakistan that many COMP sell carpet afternoon come place my

jual karpet.

sell carpet

There are many Pakistanis who sell carpets; they often come to my place in the

afternoon to sell carpets.

4.2 Object relativisation

The result for object relativisation is shown in Table 3. The number of bare active will increase

significantly if one adopts a more restrictive definition of bare passive. See footnote 7 (p. 106) for

the details. Concrete examples of each category are provided at the end of this section.

Table 3. Voice choice in object relativisation

Morphological passive (P1) Bare active Bare passive (P2) Indeterminate

38 23 11 203


10/20

All the three possible voices were observed. Then, it seems reasonable to conclude that they all

exist in Colloquial Malay. However, a sociolinguistic factor needs to be considered at this point,

namely code-mixing.

It is the consideration of code-mixing that led Cole et al. (2006) to conclude that bare passive

(P2) does not exist in Jakarta Indonesian. Consider the results of a similar examination into four

corpora of Jakarta Indonesian obtained by them. CHILD consists of utterances by children, A-C of

utterances by adults talking to children, and A-A1 and A-A2 of utterances by adults talking to

adults.

Table 4. Jakarta Indonesian (Cole et al. 2006)

Corpus (speaker) Morphological passive (P1) Bare active Bare passive (P2) Indeterminate

CHILD (children) 56 6 2 26

A-C (adults) 65 5 2 23

A-A1 (adults) 28 7 16 39

A-A2 (adults) 51 12 17 94

Note that in A-A1 and A-A2 the number of bare passives (shown in boldface) is robust enough to

confirm their existence in Jakarta Indonesian. They argue that such instances are mixed Standard

Indonesian expressions. The background sociolinguistic fact is that code-mixing with Standard

Indonesian is a characteristic of the mesolectal level of speech while it seldom occurs at the

basilectal level. A-A1 and A-A2 represent the former and CHILD and A-C represent the latter. If

one looks at CHILD and A-C, which represent the basilect, there are only two instances of bare

passive in both corpora. Therefore, they conclude in an earlier version (Cole et al. 2005) that P2 [=

bare passiveHN] does not occur in JI [= Jakarta IndonesianHN] proper, using basilectal JI as

the gold standard for JI. The construction does occur in mesolectal registers where the use of

forms and constructions from the acrolectal language [= Standard IndonesianHN] would be

expected.

Turning back to Colloquial Malay, are the eleven instances of bare passive mixed Written

Malay? The possibility of the answer being yes is quite high. In my impression, most of the

conversation in the corpus is at some level quite close to the basilect where code-mixing with

Written Malay occurs only occasionally. Since I do not have a corpus of childrens speech at hand,

nor do I know whether any attempts to build such a corpus have been made so far, I cannot prove

the correctness of that impression in the same way as done by Cole et al. (2006). Further research is

necessary.

Instead, I examined who produced how many bare actives and passives. The result is shown in

Table 5. Of the 20 speakers, only five produced bare passives. On the other hand, bare actives are

produced by as many as 16 speakers. If bare passive had the same status as bare active in the voice


11/20

system of Colloquial Malay, it must have been produced more frequently and by more speakers.

Furthermore, all of the five speakers who produce bare passives also produce bare actives, but no

one produces only bare passives. These facts endorse the idea that the eleven instances of bare

passive are actually mixed Written Malay. In conclusion, bare passive cannot be included in the

voice system of Colloquial Malay. As a consequence, the instances assigned to the category

Indeterminate turn out to be those of Bare active except for some mixed Written Malay

expressions.

Table 5. The number of bare actives and passives per speaker

Speaker Bare active Bare passive

A 1 4

B 1 3

C 1 2

D 1 1

E 1 1

F 4 0

G 3 0

H 2 0

I 2 0

J 1 0

K 1 0

L 1 0

M 1 0

N 1 0

O 1 0

P 1 0

Total 23 11

Next, let us focus on the person of the agent. Table 6 (p. 106) summarises the result.

The following two points are revealed from this table. Firstly, contrary to the claim of

prescriptive grammarians and strong proponents of bentuk persona, there is no complementary

distribution observed between morphological passive and bare passive (see the second last

paragraph of section 2). Bare passive can be used for a third person agent, regardless of whether it

is a pronoun or not. The complementary distribution does not hold between morphological passive

and bare active either.


12/20

Table 6. The person of the agent

Morphological passive (P1) Bare active Bare passive (P2) Indeterminate

1 0 14 7 84

2 0 4 1 57

Pro 2 4 1 34

Non-Pro 11 1 2 287

3

25 - - -

Secondly, when the agent is overt, bare active is the normal voice in object relativisation. This

is the case with all persons. It appears that bare active is the only choice for first and second person

agents. However, it may not be true. The fact that the corpus includes no instance of morphological

passive with first and second person agents has to do with the functional difference between

morphological passive and bare active. The agent of a morphological passive is syntactically

demoted to adjunct whereas that of a bare active is an argument. In connection with this, the agent

of a bare active is neutral informationally. However, the agent of a morphological passive is not so.

They are backgrounded when not expressed overtly and foregrounded when expressed overtly. First

and second person agents, being the immediate participants of conversations, usually need not and

should not be foregrounded. Explicit mention (i.e. foregrounding) of unnecessary or inappropriate

first and second person agents will lead to lack of politeness. The relevance of politeness to the

absence of first and second person agents in morphological passives is also pointed out by Shibata

(1992) and Cole et al. (2006).

In passing, the agents of bare actives are sometimes silent in Colloquial Malay. I analyse them

as null pronouns (pro). They are silent but existent unlike the agents of morphological actives,

which are not existent in the syntactic (constituent) structure at all.

The voice choice in object relativisation in Colloquial Malay can be summarised as follows:

(15) Voice choice in object relativisation

The unmarked voice is bare active. Morphological passive is marked, with the agent

either foregrounded or backgrounded. (Bare passive does not exist in Colloquial Malay.)

Recall here that bare active is the unmarked voice in subject relativisation too.

Finally, examples of object relativisation with each category are given below. (16)-(18) are

examples of Morphological passives.

7 Cole et al. (2006) would code these 28 instances as bare actives since they assume that the agent of bare passive is limitedto pronouns (and nouns used as pronoun substitutes). I do not accept such an assumption in this paper, respecting twoapparent bare passives with third person non-pronoun agents (see examples (27)). But if I did so, things would rather turn

for the better. This is because the number of bare actives in object relativisation would increase by 28 to 51, with 38morphological actives and 11 bare passives (see Table 3), which is more favourable to my hypothesis that bare active is theunmarked voice and bare passive does not exist in Colloquial Malay.


13/20

(16) Third person pronoun agent (3, Pro)

a. Rupanya tau, jauh-jauh dia merantau-rantau, rupanya sebelah rumah

apparently know, far she go.abroad apparently near house

abang aku juga yang [di-ambil-nya].

elder.brother my too COMP DI-take-her

It seems, you know, she went to study in countries faraway, but the man chosen by

her in the end was a neighbour to my elder brothers.

b. yang [di-bunuh-nya] tu pun orang Korea, yang membunuh tu

COMP DI-kill-him that too person Korea COMP kill that

orang luar-lah, bukan Malaysia .

person outside-PART not Malaysia

the one who was killed is Korean, the one who killed (the Korean) is an

outsider, not Malaysian .

(17) Third person non-pronoun agent (3, Non-Pro)

Contohnya yang [di-buat oleh Era] la.

for.example COMP DI-make by Era PART

For example, the one made by Era.

(18) Third person zero agent (3, )

a. Tapi kan, jenis senjata yang [di-gunakan] memang mengancam nyawa la.

but not kind weapon COMP DI-use indeed threaten life PART

But the weapons used were of the kind that really threatens your life.

b. Tetapi kalau CD lain yang original, yang [di-jual di Malaysia], kalau

but if CD other COMP original COMP DI-sell in Malaysia if

satu cerita berapa?

one story how.much

But how much are other original CDs sold in Malaysia for a piece?

(19)-(22) are examples of Bare actives.

(19) First person agent (1)

a. La la, tu yang [aku duk fikir] tu, eiyy.

INT INT that COMP I PROG think that INT

Oh, come on; thats what I was thinking.

b. Aku tak boring sebab aku banyak kerja, aku banyak aktiviti yang [aku

I not bored because I many work I many activity COMP I

boleh buat].

can do

Im not bored because I have a lot of work and many activities that I can do.


14/20

(20) Second person agent (2)

Macam, macam mana ah, cuba kau spesifik apa yang [kau nak tau].

Like how PART try you specific what COMP you want know

How, how should I explain to you? Be specific about what you want to know.


a. Test bertulis itu pun susah, tapi dia carry on boleh lagi, lepas itu

test written that even difficult but he carry on can more after that

macam ada-lah satu part yang [dia tak lepas].

like be-PART one part COMP he not pass

Even the written test was difficult, but he could carry on further, and after that, like,

there was a part that he didnt pass.

b. , yang penting dapat duit, itu saja yang [diorang dapat fikirkan].

COMP important get money that only COMP they can think

, whats important is to get money, thats the only thing that they can think

about.


Kita tahu bahasa lain yang [orang lain tak tahu].

we know language other COMP person other not know

We know other languages, which others dont know.

(23)-(26) are examples of Bare passives.


a. Apa yang [boleh kita kaitkan dengan samseng ni]?

what COMP can we connect with gangster this

What can we connect with the gangsters?

b. Kau bayangkan-lah berapa belas pinggan yang [boleh kita makan].

you imagine-PART how.many teen dish COMP can we eat

Imagine ten and how many dishes (of food) we can eat.


Ko suka melukis, sebab tu ko cuba mengaplikasikan ko punya minat tu

you like paint because that you try apply you possess interest that

dengan ko punya bidang jurusan yang [bakal ko ceburi].

with you possess area direction COMP will you be.involved.in

You like painting, so you try to apply your interest to the area that you will be involved

in the future.


15/20


Kita kena la balas balik apa yang [telah diorang buat kat kita], .

we have.to PART answer back what COMP PERF they do to us

We have to answer what they did to us in kind, .


a. Kau tahu kan apa yang [akan polis lakukan pada samseng ni].

you know not what COMP will police do to gangster this

You must know what the police will do against the gangsters.

b. Selain daripada hantu-hantu ni, apa lagi hantu yang [selalu orang

other.than from ghosts this what more ghost COMP always people

sebut-sebut] tu?

mention.repeatedly that

Apart from these ghosts, what are the ghosts that people always mention?

(27)-(30) are examples of Indeterminate instances.


a. , subjek yang [kita ambik sem ni] apa lagi ah?

subject COMP we take semester this what more PART

, what are the other subjects that we take this semester?

b. Semua ek, macam kebanyakannya yang [kita pakai] ni semua Jepun

all PART like mostly COMP we use this all Japan

buat, Suzuki, Yamaha, Honda, Kawasaki semua.

make Suzuki, Yamaha, Honda, Kawasaki all

Everything, like, mostly, what we use are all Japanese products, Suzuki, Yamaha,

Honda and Kawasaki, everything.


a. Berita apa yang [kau baca]?

news what COMP you read

What news did you read?

b. Makan-lah yang [ko beli tadi].

east-PART COMP you buy just.now

Just eat what you bought just now.


a. Mungkin dia akan sedar la apa yang [dia lakukan] tu.

maybe he/she will realise PART what COMP he/she do that

Maybe he/she will realise what he/she did.


16/20

b. Mentang-mentang kenderaan yang [diorang bawak] tu besar, ha.

just.because vehicle COMP they drive that big INT

Just because the vehicles they drive are big, yeah.

(30) Thrid person non-pronoun agent (3, Non-Pro)

a. , lagi satu masalah yang [Malaysia hadapi] aku rasa apa, masalah

more one problem COMP Malaysia face I feel what problem

setinggan.

squatter

, another problem that Malaysia is facing is, I feel, what, the problem of

squatters.

b. Kari yang [nenek aku buat] tu lain tau.

curry COMP grandmother my make that other know

You know, the curry my grandmother makes is different.

5. Conclusion

In this paper, I examined the voice employed in relative clauses in Colloquial Malay. I claimed that

the voice system of Colloquial Malay lacks bare passive. A few instances of bare passive observed

in the corpus can be regarded as a result of code-mixing with Written Malay. Thus, the voice

system of Colloquial Malay proper consists of three types, namely morphological active,

morphological passive and bare active.

Among these three types, bare active is the unmarked voice. Since the verb in bare active does

not have the prefix meN-, which blocks any NP movement across itself, both subject and object can

be relativised in bare active. There is no restriction on the person of the agent as always pointed out

for object relativisation in Written Malay. The figures of each category in the columns of Bare

active and Indeterminate in Table 6 verify this.

The remaining two voices with explicit voice morphology, i.e. morphological active and

morphological passive, are literally marked. The prefix meN- of morphological active adds some

additional (perhaps stylistic) effects. Moreover, objects cannot be relativised in morphological

active sentences owing to the blocking effect by the prefix meN- mentioned above. As for

morphological passive, the agent is either foregrounded (when present) or backgrounded (when

absent) as was stated in (15). This brings about an apparent restriction on the agent to only third

person.

The present study only dealt with the voice in Colloquial Malay and counted on secondary

sources for that in Written Malay. In another study, Isamu Shoho and I take up Written Malay as

well as Colloquial Malay and compare their voice systems (Nomoto & Shoho 2006). The results of

the present study only already imply a few noticeable differences between the two. However, when


17/20

the data from the primary sources are investigated using the same methodology, the differences will

be corroborated and manifest themselves more vividly.

References

Abdul Hamid Mahmood. 1992. Ayat Pasif Bahasa Melayu. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan

Pustaka.

Alsagoff, Lubna. 1992. Topic in Malay: The Other Subject. Ph.D dissertation, Stanford University.

Asmah Hj. Omar. 1980.Nahu Melayu Mutakhir. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.

Cartier, Alice. 1979. De-voiced transitive verb sentences in Formal Indonesian. In F. Plank (ed.)

Ergativity: Towards a Theory of Grammatical Relations, 161-183. New York: Academic Press.

Chung, Sandra. 1976a. An object-creating rule in bahasa Indonesia.Linguistic Inquiry7: 41-87.

. 1976b. On the subject of two passives in Indonesian. In C. Li (ed.) Subject and Topic,

57-98. New York: Academic Press.

. 1978. Stem sentences in Indonesian. In B. Wurm and L. Carrington (eds.) Second

International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics: Proceedings, Fascicle 1, Western

Austronesian (Pacific Linguistics, C-61), 335-365. Canberra: Research School of Pacific and

Asian Studies, Australian National University.

Cole, Peter and Gabriella Hermon. 2005. Subject and non-subject relativization in Indonesian.

Journal of East Asian Linguistics14: 59-81.

, and Yassir Tjung. 2005. Is there pasif semu (P2) in Jakarta Indonesian? Paper

presented at the 9th International Symposium on Malay/Indonesian Linguistics.

, and . 2006. Is there pasif semuin Jakarta Indonesian? Oceanic Linguistics

45: 64-90.

Comrie, Bernard. 1981.Language Universals and Linguistic Typology. Oxford: Blackwell.

Dardjowidjojo, Soenjono. 1978. Sentence Patterns of Indonesian. Honolulu: University Press of

Hawaii.

Guilfoyle, Eithne, Henrietta Hung and Lisa Travis. 1992. Spec of IP and Spec of VP: Two subjects

in Austronesian languages.Natural Language and Linguistic Theory10: 375-414.

Hassal, Tim. 2005. Taboo object relative clauses in Indonesian. In P. Sidwell (ed.) SEALS XV:

Papers from the 15th Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (Pacific Linguistics, E-1),

1-18. Canberra: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.

Musgrave, Simon. 2001. Non-subject Arguments in Indonesian. Ph.D dissertation, University of

Melbourne.

Nik Safiah Karim. 1975. The Major Syntactic Structures of Bahasa Malaysia and Their Implications

on the Standardization of the Language. Ph.D dissertation, Ohio University.

, Farid M. Onn, Hashim Hj. Musa and Abdul Hamid Mahmood. 1993. Tatabahasa Dewan,

Edisi Baharu. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.


18/20

Nomoto, Hiroki. 2006a. A Study on Complex Existential Sentences in Malay. MA thesis, Tokyo

University of Foreign Studies.

. 2006b. The multi-purpose preposition katin Colloquial Malay. In Y. Tsuruga et al. (eds.)

Gengojouhougaku Kenkyuuhoukoku 11, 69-94. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

and Isamu Shoho. 2006. Voice in Malay relative clauses: a comparison of written and

spoken language. Ms. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

and Tomoki Tsuji. 2006. Adaptability of a language to globalisationthe influence of

written-spoken differences. Paper presented at the 1st World Congress on the Power of

Language: Theory, Practice, and Performance.

Onozawa, Jun. 1996.Kiso Mareeshiago. Tokyo: Daigakushorin.

Saddy, Douglas. 1991. WH scope mechanisms in bahasa Indonesia. In L.L.S. Cheng and H.

Demirdash (eds.)MIT Working Papers in Linguistics15, 183-218.

Shibata, Norio. 1992. Murayugo. In T. Kamei, R. Kono and E. Chino (eds.) Gengogaku Daijiten

Vol.4, 363-380. Tokyo: Sanseido.

Shoho, Isamu. 1998.Mareeshiago Kyoutei. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

Voskuil, Jan E. 2000. Indonesian voice and A-bar movement. In I. Paul, V. Phillips and L. Travis

(eds.)Formal Issues in Austronesian Linguistics, 195-213. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Wouk, Fay. 1989. The Impact of Discourse on Grammar: Verb Morphology in Spoken Jakarta

Indonesian. Ph.D dissertation, UCLA.

Yeoh, Chiang Kee. 1979.Interaction of Rules in Bahasa Malaysia. Ph.D dissertation, University of

Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.


19/20

1

1 Cole et al. (2006)

2P2

1

P2

morphological activemorphological

passivebare activebare passive 4

meN- di-

(1)

2

3

meN-

4

63 122 2 2


20/20

2

meN-

meN-

38 23 11

203 3 3

11

Cole et al. (2006)

4

2

11

Cole

20 16 5

5 11

203

6

12 3 3

3
http://001_research_paper12.pdf/http://001_research_paper12.pdf/

Documents

097 Research Paper12