Shiohara, Asako

Yanti

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YANTI and Asako SHIOHARA, 2015.  ‘Clause combining in the languages of Indonesia: Introduction’. In YANTI and Asako SHIOHARA, eds. Clause combining in the languages of Indonesia. Nusa 59:1-2. [Permanent URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10108/86503] Clause combining in the languages of Indonesia: Introduction YANTI  Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia Asako SHIOHARA Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa Tokyo University of Foreign Studies The papers in this volume cover a variety of topics under the broad area of clause combining. The languages under discussion are Austronesian languages spoken in Indonesia. The first three papers describe various topics related to combining clauses in three indigenous languages, i.e. Kadorih, Makasar, and Lamaholot, respectively. The fourth paper deals with coordinate clauses in Indonesian and the last paper deals with issues related to subordination and coordination drawn from some languages of Indonesia. Three of the papers were presented at the Workshop on Clause Combining in/around Indonesia which was hosted at the Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA) at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies on 7-8 October 2012. This ILCAA workshop was one of a series of workshops on ‘Descriptive studies on Indonesian languages’ organized by the Linguistic Dynamic Science Project (Lingdy). Kazuya Inagaki provides an exhaustive description of the clause combining system in Kadorih, a dialect of Dohoi, an Austronesian language spoken in Central Kalimantan. In his description, Inagaki first discusses how coordination and subordination are distinguished based on syntactic characteristics as well as pragmatic considerations. Second, he shows that in Kadorih the landing site of the ellipsis in coordination is always in the second coordinand (cf. Haspelmath 2007:39) and that only sentences whose coordinands share a subject or a Tense Aspect Modality indicator are allowed to be elided. Third, Inagaki discusses noun phrase accessibility in relative constructions in Kadorih. He shows, particularly, how different syntactic categories have different levels of accessibility with respect to relative clause formation. Fourth, Inagaki provides a comprehensive description of complementation in the language. Finally, he presents different adverbial subordinators found in the language and discusses different types of adverbial clauses as well. Anthony Jukes mainly discusses clause nominalization in Makasar, which is spoken in South Sulawesi. His discussion begins with a brief description of the basic clause structure of the language. Next, Jukes presents clausal modifiers of nominal heads, i.e. relative clauses. Interestingly, Makasar does not exhibit a dedicated relative clause marker. The heads of relative clauses include core and semi-core arguments, as well as non-core goals and instruments and these heads are followed by the modifying clause. In addition to headed relative clauses, headless relative clauses are also found in the language although they are rare. Moreover, Jukes’s paper also describes clauses with possessive morphology which consist of three different types: RC-like possessive constructions, exclamatives/ intensives, and subordinate temporal constructions.  Naonori Nagaya’s paper is on Lamoholot, a member of Central Malayo-Polynesian language of the Austronesian language family spoken in the eastern part of Flores Island. Specifically, Nagaya presents an analysis of ləbo ‘although’, a subordinating conjunction 2 NUSA 59, 2015 which is used to express a concessive relation between main and subordinate clauses. His description begins with a general overview of subordination, coordination, and complementation in the language. It is then followed by a description of subordination with the conjunction ləbo ‘although’. Nagaya shows that ləbo is a subordinating conjunction despite the fact that ləbo appears clause finally, unlike other subordinating conjunctions, which appear clause initially. In addition, Nagaya shows that subordinate clauses headed by ləbo can stand alone without a main clause. Asako Shiohara’s paper reports the results of an experimental study of eventive coordinate clauses in Standard Indonesian. Her study employed two short movies as the instrument to collect the data from 15 participants. Coordinate clauses can be linked with a coordinating conjunction or simply juxtaposed. Within the coordinate clauses, Shiohara attempts to examine how voice selection was made by the speakers. 171 clauses were collected and 139 of these clauses were transitive clauses. Most of these clauses were active transitive clauses (almost 93%) and the remaining clauses fall under the categories of passive voice and object voice. The high frequency of actives used over the passives confirms what Cumming (1991) and Djenar (2015) claim. With respect to coordinate clauses, 100 clauses were collected in 43 coordinate sentences. 13 of these coordinate clauses were simply juxtaposed, while the others were connected using coordinating conjunctions, dan ‘and’, lalu ‘then’, and namun ‘however’. Mark Donohue discusses the complexity of the dichotomy between coordinate and subordinate clauses, which underlies most discussion of complex sentences in the literature. It has been assumed that there is a one-to-one relationship between morphosyntax and discourse, i.e. between foregrounding and coordination and backgrounding and subordination. In his paper, Donohue evaluates to what extent coordination and its morphology is associated with foregrounded material, and subordination and its morphology with backgrounded material in languages of the Indonesian area. He claims that the relationship between forms and functions is not as straightforward as is assumed (cf. Cullicover & Jackendoff 1997, De Vos 2005). He shows mismatches of grammatical forms and discourse functions drawn from data from languages of Indonesia and discusses how the ambiguity in structure resulted from non-overt or optional grammatical marking.  References Cullicover, Peter & Ray Jackendoff. 1997. Semantic subordination despite syntactic coordination. Linguistic Inquiry 28 (2). 195—217. Cumming, Susanna. 1991. Functional Change: The Case of Malay Constituent Order. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Djenar, Dwi Noverini. 2015. Active/passive alternation and switch function in Indonesian narrative discourse. Paper presented at the Second International Workshop on Information Structure of Austronesian Languages, February 15–17, 2015, at Institute for Language and Cultures, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. De Vos, Mark. 2005. The syntax of pseudo-coordination in English and Afrikaans. PhD thesis, Utrecht: LOT 114. Haspelmath, Martin. 2007. Coordination. In Complex Constructions, ed. by Timothy Shopen, volume 2 of Language Typology and Syntactic Description, chapter 1, 1–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Clause combining in the languages of Indonesia: Introduction

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Clause combining in the languages of Indonesia: Introduction

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