(The Voice of Verb and Ellipsis of Nominal Phrase in the Compound Sentences of Malay)
Dr. Sato Hirobumi (Rahmat)
Universiti Yala Rajabhat (YRU), Thailand & Universiti Malaya (UM), Malaysia
Abstract
This paper discusses the ellipses of nominal phrases that are assumed to be in the compound sentences of Malay-Indonesian. These phenomena of the ellipses have long been questioned by the Dutch and Japanese scholars since the 19th century but todays Malay-Indonesian grammar textbooks do not show the positive effect of referring to the fruits of their studies. We often found a similar explanation in Malay-Indonesian grammar books that does not fit at all the phenomena and the facts of the ellipses of nominal phrases in its compound sentences. This means that contemporary scholars (including native speakers) do not stare at the facts of Malay-Indonesian because they only follow the English grammar blindly. It proved that these patterns of the ellipses of nominal phrases involve the problems of the grammatical voice of Malay-Indonesian verbs that have been raised since the 19th century. By analyzing the phenomena of the so-called the ellipses of nominal phrases in this language, we present here a hypothesis that the predicate verb in the following clause focuses on the lexical information of a nominal phrase that it refers to in the preceding clause of a compound sentence.
Keywords: ellipsis of noun phrase, ergative construction, focus of verb, grammatical cases of nominals, semantic role, syntactic function.
Topic: Language