Sundanese complementation

Abstract

The focus of this thesis is the description and analysis of clausal complementation in Sundanese, an Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia. The thesis examined a range of clausal complement types in Sundanese, which consists of (i) yén/(wi)réhna 'that' complements, (ii) pikeun 'for' complements, (iii) sangkan/supaya/ngarah/sina 'so that' complements, (iv) raising complements, (v) crossed control complements, and (vi) nominalizations. This varied set of complement structures display distinct properties in terms of the sort of elements admitted in the complements. The theoretical aspect of the thesis is the examination of two important generalizations: (i) that complementation is a universal feature of human languages (Noonan 1985, 2007); and (ii) the well-accepted precept that finiteness plays a role in the world's languages. This thesis provides evidence that Sundanese evinces (syntactic) complementation and that any claim to the contrary is unfounded. In terms of finiteness, despite the lack of overt morphological manifestations of finiteness, the thesis argues that finiteness seems to be at work in Sundanese and that it operates as it does in other languages to account for the distribution of overt subjects. In addition, the body of data presented herein is also germane to a host of other theoretical issues, especially with regard to Austronesian languages. The first is inclusion

The Dichotomy of Auxiliaries in Javanese: Evidence from Two Dialects

“…Others treat voice morphology separately from the verb root as a reflex of v 0 (e.g Sato (2012). for Javanese) or Voice 0 , which dominates v 0 (e.g Kurniawan (2013). for Sundanese).…”

Complementation in Balinese

“…Madurese (Davies, 2014), Indonesian , and Sundanese (Kurniawan, 2013). Based on this cross-linguistic examination of CCC, I establish the syntactic properties of Balinese CCC.…”

“…Madurese (Davies, 2014), and Sundanese (Kurniawan, 2013). However, these previous studies focus mainly on arguments for the syntactic representation of CCC in order to account for the ambiguous interpretation.…”

“…Subsequently, several syntactic structures are discussed in detail, i.e. VP structure , vP structure (Nomoto, 2008), and VoiceP structure (Kurniawan, 2013). After considering all of these possible analyses, I adopt the VoiceP analysis as the most feasible structure for Balinese CCC based on its syntactic properties.…”

“…This section presents the Minimalist structure of Balinese monoclausal sentences, which includes a VoiceP projection. In order to account for the three types of voices in Balinese, I incorporate VoiceP as a separate projection above vP, following the analysis of voice in other Austronesian languages such as Indonesian (Sukarno, 2003), Acehnese (Ko, 2009), and Sundanese (Kurniawan, 2013). This maximal projection is argued to not introduce an external argument, in contrast to the proposal by Kratzer (1996), and it is headed by the voice markers (N-, Ø, -a, ka-, ma-).…”