The purposes of this current study were twofold. First, it attempted to find out the level of reading anxiety among EFL learners in rural schools. Second, it sought to determine whether there is a statistical difference in reading anxiety between rural EFL learners across gender and level of study. Seventy-seven EFL learners from several rural Indonesian schools were involved in completing a 27-items EFL Reading Anxiety Inventory (EFLRAI). The findings revealed different levels of top-down, bottom-up, and classroom reading anxiety among rural school learners. Regarding the statistical differences across gender, it is found that male learners outperformed females in terms of top-down and bottom-up reading anxiety. However, female learners offered a better understanding than male learners. Meanwhile, in terms of study grades, it is stated that freshmen learners are more dominant in experiencing reading anxiety than junior and senior learners. In short, reading anxiety has different levels among different EFL learners. In addition, differences occur when each learner with different gender and study grade experience anxiety in reading.

Kerinci is a group of grammatically diverse Malayic varieties spoken in Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia. This article focuses on a previously undescribed dialect of Kerinci, spoken in the village of Tanjung Pauh Mudik (TPM). Many Kerinci dialects have developed a morphological alternation in root-final syllables as a result of stress-related diachronic changes. In TPM, as in Sungai Penuh Kerinci (described by Steinhauer and Usman (1978), inter alia), lexical roots surface in two forms, termed 'absolute' and 'oblique', which differ in the phonological shape of their final syllable. These forms exhibit a wide array of grammatical properties that differ considerably between dialects. We focus on the function of this unique marking in the verbal domain, and argue that the oblique form marks agreement with a nominal complement. Our analysis explains why TPM, a language that retains the morphological properties of the traditional Malay voice system, unexpectedly appears to permit the extraction of nonsubject arguments from active clauses, contradicting the predictions of theories that causally link symmetrical voice morphology and a ban on nonsubject extraction from vP (e.g. Keenan 1972, 1979, Rackowski & Richards 2005. We argue that apparent cases of nonsubject extraction do not involve movement, but that the apparently moved argument is generated outside of vP and binds a phonologically null pronoun licensed by the oblique morphology; thus, we are able to relate TPM's unexpected syntactic behavior to the availability of the absolute/oblique marking. This analysis has broader consequences for the theory of pro-drop. Neeleman and Szendrői's (2007) theory of radical pro-drop is unable to differentiate between syntactically projected pronouns (like null objects in TPM) and nonobject pro-dropped arguments in TPM that lack the behavior of a syntactically projected argument. In light of this inadequacy, we put forward an alternative proposal regarding the universal typology of pro-drop.*

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Malay(ic) languages of Sumatra show a high level of internal diversity. Linguists are only beginning to understand the ways in which these languages differ from one another, and what this divergence tells us about the origins and development of Malay. This paper describes an important morphological phenomenon in Sumatran Malay: morphological word-shape alternations. Kerinci, a Malayic language spoken in the Bukit Barisan range in Jambi, exemplifies this phenomenon. Kerinci exhibits a morphological alternation which is realized in the final –V(C) of roots (e.g. ataʔ ‘roof’ vs. atək ‘the/its roof’) (Prentice & Usman, 1978; Steinhauer & Usman, 1978) inter alia). Previous studies have concluded that word-shape alternations of this sort are attested only in a subregion of Kerinci (cf. Usman, 1988). In this paper, we show that word-shape alternations resembling those found in Kerinci can be found sporadically throughout a large region of Sumatra, in both Minangkabau and Traditional Malay varieties. We describe these phenomena, and develop a historical account of their development. We conclude that word-shape alternations developed independently in several varieties as a result of shared prosodic properties.

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