Object agreement and ‘pro-drop’ in Kerinci Malay

Abstract

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.*

Noncanonical Passives: A Typology of Voices in an Impoverished Universal Grammar

“…The first construction, which I refer to as object voice following recent literature, appears in a class of Malayo-Polynesian Austronesian languages, including several varieties of Indonesian/ Malay (e.g., Chung 1976, Guilfoyle et al 1992, Sneddon 1996, Arka & Manning 1998, Cole et al 2008, Yanti 2010, McKinnon et al 2011, Balinese (Wechsler & Arka 1998;Arka 2003Arka , 2008, varieties of Javanese (Conners 2008, Sato 2012, Acehnese (Legate 2014), and Madurese ( Jeoung 2017), among others. The verb in the object voice is bare, in contrast with the canonical passive, which bears a designated prefix.…”

Phrasal alternation in the Pondok Tinggi dialect of Kerinci An intergenerational analysis

“…(4) mandʒat umpun dʒambu climb.obl tree.obl guava.obl 'Climbing the guava tree' 3 Studies examining phrasal alternation in Kerinci include Steinhauer and Usman (1978); Prentice and Usman (1978); Usman (1988); Steinhauer (2002) (all about the Sungai Penuh variety); McKinnon (2011) and Mckinnon, Cole, and Hermon (2011) (both about the variety of Tanjung Pauh). However, so far there have been no exhaustive studies with a sociolinguistic focus.…”

Infixation and Apophony in Malay: Description and Developmental Stages

“…The following table, which lists several 'basic' forms and their respective 'secondary' forms, illustrates some of the phonological properties of the alternation as well as its diverse morphological/syntactic functions. (An in-depth description of these functions can be found in works like Steinhauer & Usman, 1978, Usman, 1988, Mckinnon, 2011, McKinnon, Cole & Hermon, 2011, and Ernanda, 2015.…”