The Sixth
INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON MALAY/INDONESIAN LINGUISTICS |
Nirwana Resort Hotel, Bintan Island, Riau, Indonesia
Thomas J. Conners Yale University thomas.piernikowski@yale.edu
In this paper, I present a typology of pronouns in standard Indonesian, arguing for five distinct 'classes' of pronouns, as given in (1) below. These 'classes' will be motivated by the behavior of different (clusters of) personal pronouns around a constellation of linguistic properties, primarily syntactic, but also including both morphological and phonological phenomena (as given in (2) below). I attempt to situate the Indonesian data within several current theories of universal pronominal typologies, and demonstrate that each is inadequate to account for the Indonesian data.
Cardinaletti & Starke (1994, 1996) propose that there are three classes of pronouns: strong, weak, and clitic, with the latter two being grouped as deficient. Their analysis holds that differences among pronoun classes arises from levels of syntactic deficiency, where strong pronouns have a fully articulated CP structure; weak pronouns are realized as the head of a maximal projection; and clitic pronouns project a head only. Although their analysis was based on Romance and Germanic languages, they claim that "…there is only one system of personal pronouns provided by the human language capacity, with languages differing only as to which class they lexicalize" (Cardinaletti & Starke 1996: 27). I show that this account, however, is insufficient to account for the Indonesian data. Crucially, the C&S theory variously identifies certain Indonesian pronouns as both strong and weak, or strong and clitic, etc. Using data from Malagasy, Zribi-Hertz & Mbolatianavalona (1999) also demonstrate that the C&S paradigm is insufficient. They argue that degrees of deficiency must be distinguished: syntactic, arising from the lack of a syntactic projection; morphological, arising from morphological restructuring processes, such as affixing, producing dependent words; and phonological, arising from the lack of phonological stress. Although the Indonesian data support the need to address morphological and phonological considerations, in addition to syntactic phenomena, when attempting to analyze the distribution of pronouns, I show that Z&M's alternative theory of degrees of deficiency is also inadequate to account for the Indonesian data. Crucially here, the Z&M theory variously identifies certain Indonesian pronouns as both syntactically/morphologically/phonologically saturated (strong) and deficient (weak). Further, when the data from dialectal and non-standard varieties of Indonesian are considered, it becomes increasingly difficult to categorize the personal pronouns along universal typologies. An idiosyncratic approach is here developed allowing pronominal paradigms to differ microparametrically. 1. Indonesian Pronominal Paradigm
2. Summary: Indonesian Personal Pronouns
References
Cardinaletti, Anna & Michal Starke (1994). The Typology of Structural Deficiency. Ms. University of Venice, University of Geneva. |