Full Description
This book argues against the existence of complementation in colloquial Indonesian, and discusses the ramifications of these findings for a discourse-functional understanding of grammatical categories and linguistic structure. Based on a close analysis of a corpus of spontaneous conversational Indonesian data, the author examines four construction types which express what is often encoded by complements in other languages: juxtaposed clauses, material introduced by the discourse marker bahwa, serial verbs, and epistemic expressions with the suffix -nya. These four construction types offer no evidence to support complementation as a viable grammatical category in colloquial spoken Indonesian. Rather, they are best understood as emergent, discourse-level phenomena, arising from the interactive and communicative goals of language users. The lack of evidence for complementation in colloquial Indonesian reaffirms the need to understand linguistic structure as language-particular and diverse, and emphasizes the centrality of studying linguistic categories based on their actual occurrence in natural discourse.
Contents
1. Acknowledgments; 2. 1. Preliminaries; 3. 2. Juxtaposed clauses; 4. 3. Complementizers in context: An analysis of bahwa; 5. 4. Verbs in series; 6. 5. Epistemic - nya constructions; 7. 6. Conclusion; 8. References; 9. Appendices; 10. Name index; 11. Subject index
