Wacana: Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia
Vol. 16, No. 1

The Indonesian verbal suffix "-nya"; Nominalization or subordination?

Grangé, Philippe (Unknown)



Article Info

Publish Date
30 Apr 2015

Abstract

The suffix nya is one of the most frequent and polysemic suffixes in Indonesian. It can provide definite determination and topicalization. The "Verb nya", which often appears in a topicalized subject Noun Phrase (NP), is generally labelled as a deverbal noun. Nevertheless, many syntactic constraints set it apart from Indonesian deverbal nouns. "Verb nya" must be complemented by a NP, which can easily be reconstructed as a former subject: a sentence is topicalized and thus becomes a noun clause, generally the subject of the main clause Verb Phrase (VP). I argue that "Verb nya" is a subordinate noun clause, almost always conveying causality. This causal noun clause, an innovation in formal written Indonesian (especially in the media), seems to fill a "gap": the impossibility of beginning a sentence with a subordinating morpheme ('that', 'because').

Copyrights © 2015






Journal Info

Abbrev

publication:wacana

Publisher

Subject

Arts Humanities Languange, Linguistic, Communication & Media Library & Information Science Social Sciences

Description

Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by the Faculty of Humanities, University of Indonesia. It invites original articles on various issues within humanities, which include but are not limited to philosophy, literature, archaeology, ...