LINGUIST List 14.1426

Mon May 19 2003

Books: Discourse/Syntax, Indonesian: Englebretson

Editor for this issue: Marisa Ferrara <marisalinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. paul, Searching for Structure: Englebretson

Title: Searching for Structure
Subtitle: The problem of complementation in colloquial Indonesian
	 conversation
Series Title: Studies in Discourse and Grammar 13
			
Publication Year: 2003
Publisher: John Benjamins 
 http://www.benjamins.com/, http://www.benjamins.nl		 
			
Book URL:
http://www.benjamins.nl/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=SiDaG_13
 
Author: Robert Englebretson, Rice University 

Hardback: ISBN: 1588113671, Pages: x, 206 pp., Price: USD 112.00
Hardback: ISBN: 9027226237, Pages: x, 206 pp., Price: EUR 112.00
			
Abstract:

This book argues against the existence of complementation in
colloquial Indonesian, and discusses the ramifications of these
findings for a discourse-functional understanding of grammatical
categories and linguistic structure. Based on a close analysis of a
corpus of spontaneous conversational Indonesian data, the author
examines four construction types which express what is often encoded
by complements in other languages: juxtaposed clauses, material
introduced by the discourse marker bahwa, serial verbs, and epistemic
expressions with the suffix -nya. These four construction types offer
no evidence to support complementation as a viable grammatical
category in colloquial spoken Indonesian. Rather, they are best
understood as emergent, discourse-level phenomena, arising from the
interactive and communicative goals of language users. The lack of
evidence for complementation in colloquial Indonesian reaffirms the
need to understand linguistic structure as language-particular and
diverse, and emphasizes the centrality of studying linguistic
categories based on their actual occurrence in natural discourse.


Table of contents

Acknowledgments ix 
1. Preliminaries 1 
2. Juxtaposed clauses 37 
3. Complementizers in context: An analysis of bahwa 93 
4. Verbs in series 127 
5. Epistemic -- nya constructions 153 
6. Conclusion 187 
References 193 
Appendices 199 
Name index 201 
Subject index 203

Lingfield(s): Discourse Analysis
		Syntax
			 
Subject Language(s): Indonesian (Language code: INZ)
 
Written In: English (Language Code: ENG)


 See this book announcement on our website: 
 http://linguistlist.org/get-book.html?BookID=6166.