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The Structure of Riau Indonesian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2008

David Gil
Affiliation:
Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, 10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 0511. Email ELLGILD@NUSVM.BITNET
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Abstract

This article is concerned with the basic syntactic and semantic structure of Riau Indonesian, a hitherto undescribed dialect differing in many respects from standard Indonesian and Malay. Riau Indonesian appears to exhibit an abundance of zero-markings of various kinds, in which a wide variety of syntactic constructions and semantic categories lack overt morphosyntactic expression. Two alternative descriptions are provided: an “easy” description, couched in traditional grammatical terminology and a Eurocentric perspective, and a “simple” description, positing a single open syntactic category, and unconstrained rules of semantic interpretation. The latter, simple description, is argued to be superior.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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