Searching for Structure: The Problem of Complementation in Colloquial Indonesian Conversation
Robert Englebretson
This work 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.
سب زمرہ:
سال:
2003
ناشر کتب:
John Benjamins Publishing Company
زبان:
english
صفحات:
200
ISBN 10:
9027296723
ISBN 13:
9789027296726
سیریز:
Studies in Discourse and Grammar
فائل:
PDF, 2.27 MB
IPFS:
,
english, 2003