Benjamin, "Grammar and Polity, The Background To Standard Malay"

Trends in Linguistics The Role of Theory
Studies and Monographs 69 in Language Description
Editor Edited by
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Grammar and polity: The cultural and political
background to Standard Malay
Geoffrey Benjamin
Introduction
A great majority of the native speakers of Malay have never been able to
master the use of certain affixes [in the standard language], the most common
being me- as opposed to ber-, -kan as opposed to -i. Asmah Haji Omar
1975: 55.
These words were written not by a supercilious pedant accusing the

masses of incorrect grammar, but by a well known native-Malay descrip
tive linguist and field-working dialectologist who has also devoted much
time to the writing of National Language textbooks for use in Malaysian
schools. In effect, Professor Asmah is warning us that standard language
is a very special form of language, and that it bears a problematical
relationship to ordinary ways of speaking. In this essay I shall try to
explain why this is so, for standardised languages in general and for
Malay in particular. My task, in short, will be to show how certain
political and cultural imperatives have come to have an intimate bearing
on grammar.
1.1 Towards a non-unitary and non-autonomous view of language
A study of this kind must be predicated on a very "leaky" approach to

the study of grammar cf. Sapir 1921. In particular, I would like to argue
1 that the "internal" organisation of Language is far from unitary and
2 that we should take a non-autonomous view of languages, explicitly
incorporating contextual factors.
Recent evolutionary and brain studies have suggested that Language
is not a "thing", not a unitary phenomenon, not a "structure" in Saus
sures implied sense, but a congeries of different component elements
each with its own biological history. These components are caiqued upon
quite other things that are not in themselves specifically linguistic. In the
342 Geoffrey Benjamin The cultural and political background to Standard Malay 343
brain, language is organised neither as a single entity nor as an auto reflective thinking, constructed of articulated concepts. But we also retain
nomous one: syntactic and propositional functions usually occur in the the basic mammalian way of personally and non-reflectively knowing the
left cortical hemisphere, "naming" in the right hemisphere, and prosodic world through condensed notions and feelings i. e., through symbols, in
features in both hemispheres and in the connections between them. The the fullest sense of the word. It is through this pre-reflective, condensed,
production and perception of speech are separate; phonemes are not all personal knowledge rather than through reflective, articulated, conceptual
equal in their perceptibility by the brain as experiments with very young thought that we construct the greatest part of our daily actions. Quite
babies have confirmed. simply, we know what were doing, but if we stop to think to shift
-
Laboratory studies on chimpanzees our closest relatives and gorillas from unfocused-on notions to focused-on concepts our ability to act
-
our next-closest relatives have shown that there is a close connection on that knowledge may become reduced, or even blocked.3
between their manual constructional abilities and the kinds of syntactic Such assertions might still worry the linguist or sociologist, but the
operations they demonstrate when taught to use language. Apes and underlying view has long since been accepted by many a hard-core
humans appear to share everything naming, predications, action-sche zoologist or ethologist. The laboratory work on ape language may be
mata up to, but probably not including, syntactic transformations - equivocal where syntax is concerned, but it has left us in no reasonable
assuming, of course, that "transformations" have any existence outside doubt that apes work to subjectively held meanings, and that they are
of certain theories of language. Much of the propositional syntax and capable of communicating those meanings to others when circumstances
production of language is calqued upon meaning-schemata relating pri are favorable.4 Moreover, such communications can hardly be accounted
marily to manual operations, and therefore to handedness: put crudely, for unless we assume that they are both intentional and intentionally
the semantic-cum-syntactic sequence Subject verb Object is mapped
- -
intersubjective.
onto the action-schema Righthand- action Lefthand. These findings re
- The subjective domain of language activity is quite complex, however,
late, presumably, to the evolutionary depositional sequence of the various for even the simplest speech act requires us to carry out at least two
components that have since been secondarily reworked as "Language". mental operations. First, we must bring our notions into focus so as to
The dominant use of the vocal-auditory channel has misled us into map them onto concepts; and then we must externalise those concepts
confusing language with speech, tempting us thereby into regarding by encoding them onto a linearly organised flow of speech. Language,
language as a single entity. But it may well be that in the evolutionary therefore, is a phenomenal threat. Speaking forces us out of the happy
chain, speech in the sense of communicative vocalisation is linked only pre-reflective state in which we each simply know the world through our
secondarily with the other components of "language". This suggests that own personal authentic symbolism, into a state where we have to work
the underlying predicative structures i. e., the meanings are prior to the hard at reflectively modeling that knowledge onto unyielding articulated
manner in which they become linearised in speech i. e., syntactic struc concepts that are nonpersonal and unauthentic.
tures. Syntax, therefore, may not be the locus of language at all, but an This suggests that language is the primary articulatory force, pulling
epiphenomenon of the vocalising of meanings: speaking requires us to us away from preconceptual symbolic and tacit-condensed knowing, from
articulate our meanings onto linearised predicative schemata that derive notion to concept: semantic primitives are pre-linguistic.5
ultimately from manual operations. What then is the nature of Language considered as an articulatory
On this view, meanings are not only prior to grammar - hardly a force? For a clue, let us look briefly again at ape "language". Despite
shocking proposition! - but to language.2 Since we are mammals, we the seeming absence of linguistic activity among chimpanzees and gorillas
must have evolved from creatures that were already endowed with the in the wild, Washoe, Koko and their co-workers proved capable of a
necessity and not just the possibility to construct action on the basis of noteworthy degree of such activity in the laboratory, which they retained
subjectively held meanings. This led to the emergence in our species and after their subsequent release into a reservation area. Any preadaptatiOn
in the chimpanzee and gorilla too of self-consciousness: we have become to language that they carried with them must therefore have been based
subjects reflexively aware of ourselves as both agents and objects. This on some behavioral complex other than language, probably the neural
subjectivity is the particular property of human consciousness that permits semantic complex associated with manipulative activity discussed earlier.
Thus, for these experimental apes at least, language was an institution, Even the mere act of speaking may carry quite different meanings in
conventional in its organisation and applied intentionally to them by different situations. Chinese and Malay ideas, for example, contrast very
human members of the wider social network in which they were spending strongly in this respect: among the former, speaking is the socially marked
their lives. activity, while among the latter keeping silent is marked. Among the
Temiars a Mon-Khmer-speaking population of northern Peninsular Ma
laysia, individuals entering a house or village after an absence of a week
1.2 Languages as institutions or more should not speak until about twenty minutes have passed.9
More radically still, Roy Harris 1980 has argued that people differ
There is no a priori reason why the above comments should not also be fundamentally in their ideas as to the nature of language itself. Nowhere
true to human languages. To take a parallel instance: the radically is it possible to talk about language in its own terms, for we do not know
variable patterns of social organisation exhibited by our species remain what those terms are. Instead, we employ surrogates to serve as models
recognisably human in character, not through any species-wide genetic
of what language is "like", what it "does" and how it relates to the
programming for social organisation as such, but simply through the
"really real". It is the latter notion, in particular, that varies.
historically variable, institutionally shaped expression allowed to our
The West, according to Harris, has taken the path of "reocentric"
underlying psychoattachment systems.6 The various languages of the
surrogation by holding that things are prior to language, and that lan
world could well be institutions in much the same sense. In other words,
guage is primarily a means of referring to the world "out there" a -
Language may not have evolved at all: it may simply have been a chance
view all too familiarly incorporated into much linguistic philosophy. The
discovery - perhaps employing manual gesture at first - that was taken
South Asian tradition, on the other hand, has taken the "psychocentric"
up in a big way and spread abroad as an institution once people had
path of regarding subjective consciousness as the irreducible, and language
recognised its manifold advantages.7
as reflecting the mind. The Chinese tradition has put written words first,
My aim, however, is not to debate the origin of language, but to
propose that we may learn much about Language and languages by in a "logocentric" surrogation that leads people to hold that the posses
regarding them in part, at least as historically and politically embedded sion of a name is the truest proof of existence; people, things and actions
must, if necessary, be rearranged to fit into the pre-existent grid of names
institutions rather than as the exponents of an organically evolved natural
phenomenon.8 Let us now apply this approach to the problem of under by which they are called. Such ideas are embedded thoroughly in the
standing why the various languages of the world have come to be the everyday lives of the people who live by the various cultural traditions,
way they are. To a large extent the answer is that they have been made but they have also shaped the character of formal scholarly traditions.
so by human intervention, in a manner that is open to sociological and In particular, the reocentric surrogationalism characteristic of the Western
historical investigation. intellectual tradition underlies much of modern linguistics especially
-
So far we have examined only the "internal" properties of language, those parts that are rather more fiduciary than empirically based. Recent
but equally equivocal conclusions must be drawn from studies of the work has led some linguists to challenge this view of language, however.
"externals" - human-language use in social and cultural contexts. Socio Studies have pointed to the fundamental importance of communicative
linguistic and dialectological approaches have demonstrated that what "packaging" in actual utterances cf. Foley-Van Valin 1984 and of
we normally think of as discrete "languages" are very open indeed, pragmatics in discourse Levinson 1983. Such features are almost totally
exhibiting non-boundedness and non-homogeneity as quite normal fea absent from the rather more abstract "form-sentences" that underlie most
tures. Chambers and Trudgill 1983 have suggested that it is often useful theoretical-linguistic analyses. The mainstream approach to linguistic
to regard each "language" as a diasystem, made up of somewhat abstract analysis is still heavily in debt to the philosophers notion of reference
elements, even for the purposes of grammatical, phonological or semantic - that language is primarily a device for making propositions about the
analysis. And Labov and others have shown that sociologically based world and that it evolved as such. But recent approaches to the evolution
studies of variation in language belong just as much at the core of of language e. g. Reynolds 1983 have provided evidence for a quite
linguistics as does the analysis of syntax or morphology. different view - that language is primarily concerned with the intersub
jective coercion of mental imagery, and only secondarily with reference deterministic relation between them, for they are linked not by a causal
and proposition. 10 If these views are correct, then the practice of equating nexus but by an implicational one. The meanings in an individuals
language with syntax is missing the point.11 consciousness relate to cultural and linguistic forms as type to token
Studies of linguistic form phonology, morphology and syntax by rather than as effect to cause. And, as we have seen, neither "languages"
culturally sensitive investigators have revealed the existence of many nor "cultures" are unitary bounded structures. They are better looked on
features that more conventional approaches have rejected, or treated as as institutions rather than structures - as the cumulative and piecemeal
trivial. Yet, it is precisely these "trivial" features that enable us to gain creations of human beings acting sometimes reflectively and sometimes
any kind of subjective attachment to the languages we speak, and to prereflectively, for use in gaining understanding of the world and in the
attain a sense of coherence between our language-use and the world we constructing of individual action. As Becker 1979: 257 puts it, "the
inhabit. There is, for example, much non-arbitrariness i. e., iconicity in figure a sentence makes ...is just as much a cultural artifact as a calendar,
language: this, surely, is what allows us to "wear" the language we speak a genre of music, or a mode of painting".
just like we wear our workaday clothes - comfortably.12 One conse On this view, what is usually treated as language structure syntactic
quence of this that the various morphological or phonological "syncret structure, especially may be no more than the unintended outcome of
isms" that languages exhibit often demand cultural, not purely linguistic, individuals attempts to encode their intended meanings onto linear
analyses. The considerable semantic and sociolinguistic variation in the speech constructed out of culturally given linguistic materials. Toulmin
use of the Malay affixes me-, ber-, -kan and ter-, which forms the substance 1971 argued forcefully that "structures" in the brain need not be pe
of this paper, can only be satisfactorily explained in terms of the notional culiarly linguistic for their outcome to be language. Despite the brave
meanings they carry - and these meanings are peculiar to the sociocul attempts of the linguistic functionalists, therefore, the question "What
tural framework within which standard Malay has been formed. kinds of language are there in the world, and why do they differ?", which
In general, grammatical organisation - especially as studied through underlies a great deal of the recent renewed interest in linguistic typology,
the typological approach - exhibits constraints that reveal the combined cannot be answered from within "pure" linguistics alone. The search for
effects of several different factors. Among these are 1 internal functional explanation requires that we go outside the language "system", even at
pressures; 2 general phenomenal pressures of which recent work on the risk of so deconstructing our object of study that we can no longer
"semantic hierarchies" is an example; and 3 institutionalisation to suit talk of it as a thing or substance of some kind.
certain sociocultural preferences such as the apparent predominance of
SVO structures in standardized national languages. Despite much op
1.3 Intra-language variation
position over the years, the Humboldtian, Sapirean and Whorfian treat
ment of grammars as repositories of views of the world seems not only
All languages, even those spoken in the most isolated small-scale com
to have stood the test of time, but to be occasioning renewed and munities, exhibit shifts in grammar and style between more formal
sophisticated study. If different kinds of grammar are indeed responses "High" and more colloquial "Low" poles. Continuous-discourse ac
to different modes of showing interest in the world, then discussion of tivities, such as speech-making, story-telling and religious talk, are every
such typological and grammatical issues as for example the distribution where marked by a shift of register. What remains obscure is whether
of Nominative/accusative versus Ergative/absolutive constructions or of there are any universals in the kinds of linguistic devices employed to
Topic-dominance versus Subject-dominance would be best pursued with mark the different speech-registers. It might be thought, for example,
regard to cultural context. that an increase in morphological and syntactic complexity is always a
This is not meant to imply that language determines individual thought, feature of High varieties. But, as Chinese illustrates, the reverse relation
only that it has a role in shaping our interests in the world and in sometimes holds, for there the pre-modern High register exhibited an
constraining the ease with which we can communicate to others the extremely elliptical mode of expression, devoid of all but the most basic
various views of the world that we might hold. Although language, culture sentence components, while the colloquial register employed a very ex
and individual action are tightly interconnected, there is no solidary or plicit style of utterance.
Published discussion of the differences between High and Low registers culture and the worldview associated with modernism OTHER is the
has concentrated either on the sociolinguistic variables themselves, con tacit taken-for-granted, pre-reflective notion out of which an awareness
sidered merely as the exponents of continuing linguistic change, or on of Self is constructed, as a focused-on, explicit reality that can be talked
the social contexts in which the variables appear. Little attempt has been about relatively easily.
made to discover whether any intrinsic relation holds between the sub 2. In the immanent mode of orientation which was normal in, among
stance of the linguistic variables and the contexts in which they are found. others, some of the classical Asian civilisations such as China and Java
This relation is most often assumed to be arbitrary, in accordance with SELF is the tacit taken-for-granted, pre-reflective notion out of which
one of the major principles of professional linguistics - the supposed an awareness of Other is constructed, as a focused-on, explicit reality
"arbitrariness" of the linguistic sign. But this principle as I have been that can be talked about relatively easily.
arguing is not necessarily correct, nor is it the best starting point for 3. In the dialectical mode of orientation, however, the dialectical rela
further linguistic work. tionship of SELF and OTHER itself is the tacit, pre-reflective notion out
of which coherence is constructed, such that Self can be focused on and
talked about only in ways that also implicate Other, and vice versa. This
1.4 Language, coherence, regime and polity
mode is normal in many, but not all, tribal cultures as well as in much
of Hindu culture; it encompasses most of the ways of thought treated by
Language and culture must have some connection, for it would otherwise
Lvy-Bruhl and Levi-Strauss in their studies.
be impossible for individuals to act. The precondition for action is a felt,
pre-reflective coherence between among other things ones knowledge At any moment, an individuals consciousness will be shaped by only
of oneself, of the world of others in and upon which one acts, and of the one of these modes of orientation: since the modes impose coherence,
languages one speaks in bridging the gap between oneself and those there can be no merging or gradual transition between them. Between
others. We are, after all, single organisms that do all these things! one orientational mode and another only leaps are possible, like the
Coherence is generated through acts of positive mental appropriation. perceptual flip-flop we experience when looking at certain kinds of optical
The individual lends structure to his or her world including the language illusion, where what was "ground" a moment ago is now seen as "figure",
in it by a process of ordered filtering, in which some phenomena are for and vice versa. There is nothing of a continuous or statistical character
the moment focused on while others recede into the background. Structure about this; it is a discontinuity, a more formal treatment of which might
- or better, structuration - therefore lies in the various filtering modes entail the use of Catastrophe Theory rather than statistical analysis. The
of orientation we have been enabled to construct for ourselves, rather likelihood, however, is that any one individual will be operating most of
than in the historically transmitted language or cultures to which we have the time in only one of the possible modes of coherence, for these modes
access. Of course, we could not do this without having gained some are far from politically neutral.
knowledge of those language or cultures in the first place. To the extent that languages are institutions, they are open to manip
At the most basic level there are, I suggest, just four alternative modes ulation by those who might wish for artistic or political reasons to employ
of orientation, and these are built out of the differential focusing of our linguistic means to place limits on the ways in which others or even they
attention as between SELF and OTHER. They are printed like this to themselves orientate their consciousness. Since all languages are complex,
indicate that they refer to pre-reflective notions, not formulated concepts. open-ended and variable, it is well within the resources of any language
Of these orientational modes, only three - the transcendental, the im to allow each of its speakers to appropriate coherence from it in a variety
manent and the dialectical - are of any practical significance in analysing of ways. But since coherence is in the first place embedded in ones
the relations between individual action, language, culture and society. 13 actions at least as much as in ones thoughts, there is a marked tendency
These modes of orientation may be characterised in the following for each orientational mode to be associated with a distinct mode of
relatively abstract terms. interpersonal attention and interactional style. Consequently, in any one
1. In the transcendental mode of orientation which is normal in, among polity that is, a social network institutionalised or thought of as a
others, the monotheistic civilisations, Theravada Buddhist polities, Malay bounded power-dominated domain those who wish to achieve power
will strive to establish just one mode of orientation as the overarching of languages has been the nation-state, a societal form that evolved in
one for the people they wish to dominate. This they will do by actively Europe between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, inchoately at
though not necessarily thinkingly attempting to shape the patterns of first but later through conscious planning. By the mid-nineteenth century
action and interpersonal communication that maintain the different the nation-state had become imitable and exportable, and with it the idea
modes of orientation in the dominated individuals consciousness. If they that each state or "country" should have its own language. The nationalist
succeed in this aim, they will have created a regime - a cultural tradition fervour that surrounded the establishment of Europes national languages
actively systematised by sanction-backed restrictions so that only one of should not blind us to the hard-headed political calculation that lay
the possible modes of orientation remains capable of overt and public behind the process. Ivan Illich 1981: 35-51 has claimed that the fashion
expression, whatever the individuals involved may privately feel. 14 started with the actions of Elio Antonio de Nebrija in Queen Isabelas
It is my thesis that languages have frequently, and perhaps universally, Spain, who created a standardised Castilian language in 1492. His ex
been manipulated as a means to the establishment of desired cultural pressed aim was to regulate what might be printed and read by ordinary
regimes. The deliberate standardising of languages is the most obvious people; Castilian was to be their "mother tongue" in exactly the same
example of this process, but essentially the same process takes place in way as Spanish Christianity had been shaped to accord with the image
miniature whenever one person chooses to address another in a way that of Mother Church. It is no mere coincidence that the year 1492 also saw
stresses power rather than solidarity. the expulsion of all Muslims and Jews from Spain!
In those polities where the political domination is weak as, for example, Spanish citizens now had to learn their "mother" tongue from specialist
in many tribal communities the dialectical mode will probably prevail. teachers; this must have exerted a considerable force towards the tran
As social psychologists have repeatedly shown, interpersonal relations
scendentalisation of their consciousness. Other countries have since
are in reality dialectical. Where the domination is strong, however, the
adopted similar patterns with enthusiasm, spurred on later by the merger
transcendental or immanent mode will usually be made to prevail. The
of nationalism with modernism and industrialisation. In modern nation-
dialectical mode may serve too, as it has in some periods of Indias
states the standardisation of language is regularly employed to impose a
history. If the Immanent mode prevails as it did for example, in post-
gesellschaftlich mode of consociation on the citizenry, whose attachment
Han China until early this century, or in the pre-Republic central Javanese
to unspoken, directly-experienced sodalities and places is thereby broken.
states it will be as a means of making the populace think of themselves
as having no concern with the rulers actions. The latter can then continue Instead, the state offers them overtly labeled, but secondary, "identities"
in an uninterfered-with domain, encapsulated off from the population at to cling to. Interference is legitimated and people come to take an
large. But if the transcendental mode prevails - as it has in most Malay- outsiders view of their own lives; their actions can now be bent all the
speaking polities and does in all modern nation-states - it will be as a more readily to the national will. 16
means of turning the people into the positively reacting dependents of Roy Harris has claimed that this statist matrix helped forge the idea
some others the governments or Gods will. that "languages" are discrete entities. Each language, moreover, came to
be thought of as the exponent of some perfect ideal form, which every
speaker should strive to exhibit in his or her own speech. The key act in
1.5 Language and the state the propagation of this illusion, Harris argues 1980: 130, was the
creation of monolingual dictionaries in Renaissance Europe, when clas
In general, then, people will always seek to reconstruct their languages sical learning began to spread. "Classical fallacy", accordingly, is Harriss
to suit their requirements. In transcendental and immanent regimes es term of opprobrium for the devotion to correctness, prescription and
pecially, those requirements will often be, in the broad sense, political. 15 aesthetic purity that has since come to characterise much of modern
We should never forget, though, that precisely the same linguistic devices thought. Linguists, Harris warns, are among the greatest offenders all -
may be employed in shaping peoples aesthetic or religious orientations, the worse for disguising their deep-seated prescriptivism under the banner
if only temporarily. In recent centuries the major force for the reshaping of description!
2. The Malay dialect-continuum pendence has continued to express its political imperatives in these same
cultural idioms, so that the situation of the modern Malay language in
Such classicising attitudes are not restricted to Western-derived modern Malaysia, where it is now known as Bahasa Malaysia, still partakes
ism or the nation-state, however. Among the other polities where they largely of that framework. 17 The Malay language came also to provide
took hold were the several pre-modern Malay kingdoms that emerged the Republic of Indonesia with its national language known there as
along the coasts of eastern Sumatra, the southern Malay Peninsula and Bahasa Indonesia, even though native-Malay speakers constitute one of
western Borneo between the seventh and nineteenth centuries. By com the smaller, regional minorities of that country. Javanese is by far the
mon repute the earliest of these was the "empire" of Srivijaya, centred "largest" language of Indonesia, possessing moreover a long literary
on what is now the city of Palembang in South Sumatra. The Srivijayan history of its own; but its restriction until very recently to the central
rulers left a fairly lengthy body of dated inscriptions in Old Malay from portion of the island of Java and, perhaps, its very embeddedness in the
barely exportable values of Javanese culture led to its rejection as the
around AD 680, rediscovered only during the present century Coeds
basis for Bahasa Indonesia. How then did Malay come to be chosen for
1930; Casparis 1956. Save for one inscription in Old Cham said to date
the task? The primary reason is surely that the Dutch, during their long
from around AD 400, these constitute the oldest extant materials in any
colonial overlordship of the East Indies, themselves employed Malay as
Austronesian language.
the language of administration, and often of daily life too. This choice
Srivijaya disappeared around 1400, passing its mantle of legitimacy
reflects in turn the fact that the earliest European contacts with the East
onto the short-lived kingdom of Melaka Malacca. A few years after the
Indies were made, necessarily, by sailing through the Straits of Melaka
Melakan court had converted from Hinduism and/or Tantric Buddhism and the Riau Islands - the very heartland of Malay speech and the area
to Islam, the kingdom succumbed to the Portuguese in 1511. But there where a tradition of writing outsider-orientated historical documents had
were many other Malay-speaking polities in the region, some evanescent, begun in the sixteenth century. It was one version of this Riau-based
some long-lasting. Almost all came into being through a monopoly over written norm that was to become the standard language for use through
the trade in forest or mineral products achieved by individuals who were out the non-Malay speaking areas too. The spoken forms of Malay that
also in a position to capitalise on widely disseminated Indian ideas of spread further east have a more complicated history, however, and mod
kingship. These states grew through the progressive transformation of ern Bahasa Indonesia is consequently spoken today against a very hetero
the hinterland tribal populations into emergent peasantries, which thereby geneous linguistic backdrop, which often includes other varieties of Ma
masuk Melay entered Malaydom in the process. Paradoxically, though, lay. The major difference between the Indonesian and the Malaysian
many of the courts surrounded themselves most immediately with tribal situations is that Bahasa Indonesia is a second language for the vast
populations, who did not so readily give themselves up to peasantisation. majority of its speakers, while Bahasa Malaysia is spoken mostly by
As a consequence, most of the historically recorded Malay states were people whose first language is one or other variety of Malay. 18
constituted of a dine of Malayness, with the most cultivatedly Malay if As a consequence of this complicated history, the sociolinguistic vari
frequently foreign-originated individuals occupying the courtly positions, ability of Malay is very dense. I shall illustrate this in the rest of the
and the least cultivatedly yet purest Malay individuals at the tribal base. paper by examining a small but central part of Malay grammar the -
Filling the sandwich were the ordinary Malay peasants, who came to verbal affixes - paying special attention to the transformations that
share their rulers concern for an explicit Malayness, thereby attaining occur as speakers move between formal and colloquial Malay. The
some reflected civilisational glory as the price for their lost autonomy. differences between these varieties are more significant than is usually
Culturally, this political dine was constituted of religion namely, Islam recognised, for a Malay speakers decision whether to express a particular
in varying shades of orthodoxy and of language i. e., Malay, spoken meaning in a formal or a colloquial manner entails a host of cultural and
and written with varying degrees of the "High"-code grammatical qual social considerations embedded in the grammars and lexicons he or she
ities discussed in this paper. must then choose between. The special character of the modern standard
The particular version of twentieth-century Malay nationalism that language forms of Malay is best understood by carrying out such a
eventually won out in the struggle for Malayan now Malaysian inde comparison.
2.1 Condensed and articulated modes of expression The significance of these differences between the condensed and artic
ulated modes lies, rather, in what they imply for the interactional and
Colloquial Malay expresses meaning in as condensed a manner as pos hence social concomitants of communicative speech acts. Condensed
sible, while formal Malay prefers a more articulated mode of expression. expression is associated with a desire for or the implying of mutual co
The condensation characteristic of colloquial Malay speech is achieved optation between speaker and addressee. Articulated expression, on the
largely through employing nouns and verbs in their naked, unaffixed root other hand, implies a desire for a distancing between speaker and ad
forms, and by eliding all but the most necessary expression of the subject dressee. Making our meanings explicit, as we do when speaking in a more
and object participants. This leads to a reduced or covert expression of articulated mode, places our addressee in the as-if position of having
participant structure, agency and transitivity. The lexicon consists of a little or no prior knowledge of whatever it is we are talking about. It
large number or distinct roots displaying relatively little secondary mor implies that we are privy to some special knowledge about the world and
phological derivation. Sentence-organisation exhibits a preference for that we are in a sufficiently differentiated social position to control its
paratactic, event-dominated topic-comment structures and for egocentric dissemination: speaker and addressee are to be thought of as outsiders
modes of expression. As in other language communities, speech of this with respect to each other. Such a mode is especially appropriate to
kind is often pilloried as ignorant, sloppy or debased. But colloquial languages standardised for public use in modern nation-states, just as it
Malay represents a positively different way of expressing experience and was appropriate to the highly transcendental frame of reference coerced
meanings than that employed when speaking in a more formal manner, in earlier centuries by those individuals - themselves often outsiders -
since it betokens a here-and-now-oriented mode of consciousness asso who wished to entrench themselves at the top of the Malay status
ciated with those contexts of life in which the wider social world, at least hierarchy.
at the moment of speaking, is not accorded much importance. Keeping our meanings implicit by speaking in a condensed manner, on
The modern "High" varieties of Malay are characterised, on the other the other hand, makes our addressees into fellow conspirators, adjured
hand, by: the explicit and obligatory marking of participant structure, to keep secret what we and they share as equals. It does not matter, on
agency and transitivity; a lexicon derived morphologically from a rela this view, whether we both truly share in each others knowledge: what
tively small body of roots by reference to certain general and abstract matters is whether or not we go along with the sociolinguistic game of
semantic notions; a preference for hypotactic, participant-dominated sub being insiders with respect to each other. To allow people to continue
ject/predicate sentence organisation; and by sociocentric modes of ex addressing us in an articulated manner whatever our own thoughts on
pression. These features betoken a there-and-then oriented, other-cath the matter is to grant legitimacy to the "outsider" social disjunction they
ected mode of consciousness associated with the authority-based, medi are attempting to create. But to allow people to continue speaking in a
ated social relations typical of the pre-modern trading polities and modern condensed manner, even if we have no idea whom or what they are
nation-states in which the "High" varieties of Malay have been developed. talking about, is to value the moments "insider" identification above all
The condensed character of colloquial Malay should not, however, be else. Such conversations are, in fact, not uncommon in Malay social
thought to imply that it is "restricted" in the range of meanings it may settings, and individuals will later sometimes admit sheepishly to not
express. Nor should the articulated character of formal Malay be thought having been sure exactly what they had been discussing!
of as necessarily more "elaborate" in anything but its surface mode of The two modes condensed and articulated also imply that as speakers
expression. The terms "restricted" and "elaborated" have frequently been we are able to coerce the different world shapes onto which our hearers
used, since Basil Bernsteins work, to characterise the differences between project their subjective experience cf. Johns 1979. The condensed mode
High and Low speech-codes, sometimes with precisely the implication I implies an essential a-historicity, an uninterest in the relations between
wish to avoid. I would argue, to the contrary, that in Malay as probably happenings, and a downplaying of the idea that individuals can intervene
in most languages the more condensed ways of speaking allow the hearer personally in events. These are precisely the features that colloquial Malay
to construct a more elaborate range of possible meanings, while the more shares with the sort of classical Malay literature that was composed for
articulated ways tend to restrict the hearer to a single understanding. recitation by Malays to other Malays. The downplaying of individual
Geoffrey Benjamin The cultural and political background to Standard Malay 357
356
personality in that literature has much in common with the social co as having meanings; any grammatical "functions" they may have are
optation that infuses colloquial Malay speech, for any emphasising of secondary.
individuality would be seen as implying that someone is acting in a Only in Bahasa Indonesia is the use of all of these verbal affixes
manner independent of others feelings and actions. These values are regarded as obligatory. In formal Bahasa Malaysia most of whose
reversed, however, in the articulated mode of language construction speakers and writers are, significantly, also speakers of one or more local
employed in modern formal Malay, just as they are in the kind of varieties of colloquial Malay there is a degree of choice. This is true
"classical" Malay that was written either by or for non-Malays to per especially of the so-called "active-voice" or "actor-focus" prefix me-,
suade outsiders of a courts legitimacy. Here we find historicity, cause- which Abdullah Hassan 1974: 102 characterises as the "least marked"
and-effect and personal individuality as basic ingredients: the world is verbal voice in Malay. Nevertheless, there is still a considerable gap
shaped in a way essentially the same as the transcendental world-shape between standardised Bahasa Malaysia and the colloquial varieties of
of modernism, of the contemporary nation-state, or, for that matter, of Malay in the usage and meanings of the verbal affixes. In this paper I
orthodox Islam the religion that forms an integral part of cultural shall discuss only me-, ber-, and -kan in any detail; the remainder will be
Malayness. discussed elsewhere.
3.1 Verbal suffixes

3. Malay verbal-orientation marking
The "domain-complement" or "locative" suffix -i appears in colloquial
In formal modern Malay, which has the basic word-order Subject- Malay only in certain fossilised forms, such as baiki to repair root:
Verb-Object, the orientational markers are attached to the predicative baik good. Its meaning is otherwise always expressed by means of a
verb-stem; the subject-orientation markers are prefixed, and the object separate preposition, so that the formal:
i. e. predicate-complement-markers are suffixed. Figure 1 displays the
full range of possibilities in formal Malay predicates referring to con 1 saya menanami kebun dengan sayur
trolled actions or processes. Somewhat different considerations apply I me-plant-i garden with vegetables
with predicates lacking a controlling agent. I plant the garden with vegetables.
PREDICATE becomes in the colloquial:
causative per- 2 aku tanam sayur di kebun

-kan affected I plant vegetables in garden
active me- I plant vegetables in the garden.
SUBJECT VERB COMPLEMENT
middle ber where in is expressed by the separate preposition di. Shortly, we shall
-i domain see that -i is still used productively in Standard Malay, especially in the
passive di- Indonesian variety.
The "affected-complement" or "goal" suffix -kan has a range of
Figure 1: The verbal affixes of Malay
identifiable functions in formal Malay: benefactive, causative/factive, and
nowadays increasingly transitive direct object. In colloquial Malay the
Figure 1 indicates only the grammatical functions of the affixes; their benefactive and causative functions are usually expressed in a more
meanings will be discussed later. I hope to show that Malay-speakers, analytical manner through the use of separate prepositions or of serial
especially at the colloquial level, do in fact treat these affixes primarily verb constructions:
The cultural and political background to Standard Malay 359
358 Geoffrey Benjamin
3 Benefactive: I bought him a book. as opposed to:

a. Formal:
saya membelikan dia buku 6 buku itu dilihati oleh Heru
I me-N-buy-kan him book book that di-look-i by Heru
b. Colloquial: The book was looked at again and again by Heru.
aku be/i buku untuk dia
I buy book for him Now, neither "cadence" nor "euphony" can explain these usages, and
we must turn instead to questions of meaning, or at least to the overt
4 Causative: I made the car go. marking of meanings that were previously left unmarked. I suggest that
a. Formal: this new "direct-object" use of -kan is an intensification of the general
saya menjalankan kereta itu tendency for formal Malay to give positive expression to participant
I me-N-go-kan car that orientation in places where colloquial Malay prefers to elide all reference
b. Colloquial: to the participants.21 The underlying concern, it seems to me, is TRAN
aku kasi jalan kereta tu SITIVITY, not simply as a syntactic or even semantic concern, but as a
I give go car that cultural notion of some importance. This sense of transitivity comes very
close to the notion of "centrifugal action" that Naylor 1978: 396 argues
While -kan has a reduced role in colloquial Malay, its importance in is one of the basic parameters within which Austronesian syntax works.
modern formal Malay is increasing. Earlier writers noted that, in addition On this view, syntactic transitivity in the ordinary sense of direct-object
to its indirect-object, causative and benefactive uses, the suffix -kan was complementation is a relatively trivial issue, of concern more to those
also used in simple transitive sentences where the verb is followed by a interested in classifying than in explaining syntactic relations. But I shall
direct object. But they could give no clear indication of its usage beyond retain the term "transitivity" here, as it has proved useful in cultural
talking of "cadence" Winstedt 1927: 100 or "euphony" Mohamed analyses that I have been carrying out parallel to this linguistic discussion.
Ali-Coope 1952: 132-3 as the criterion. Winstedts example was buat I shall return to Naylors ideas later, when discussing the "middle-voice"
rumah or buatkan rumah make a house though it is arguable that the
-
prefix ber-.
latter would more likely be understood by a Malay speaker as a bene Transitivity is fundamentally the condition or process whereby some
factive: make [someone] a house.19 thing passes from one domain to another, especially when those domains
In Bahasa Indonesia too the suffix -kan seems, according to Lombard are thought of as source and goal respectively. Many languages such as
1977: 132, to be used in much the same way: "dans plusieurs cas le English do not give overt morphological marking to transitive predicates,
forme en me-.. .-kan est disponible paralllement a Ia forme en me-, sans while other languages such as Russian make overt transitivity-marking
quil soit possible de dgager une dffrence bien nette."20 He treats the obligatory. But in neither case is transitivity as such normally an impor
me-. -kan pattern of affixation as an "index de rection" equivalent to
tant focus of the speakers attention. In Peninsular Malay as opposed
. .
my "orientation-marker" additionally to its other derivational functions

to Bahasa Indonesia, however, where the overt marking of transitivity
benefactive, causative, with which it may, as Lombard puts it, often
is possible but optional, even at the formal level, the notion TRANSI
"amalgamate". Dardjowidjojo 1974: 379 reports that the suffixes -i and
TIVITY must form a semantic focus of attention in its own right every
-kan are in "extremely productive use" in Bahasa Indonesia, where they
time a speaker decides whether or not to employ the [me-].. .-kan [source]-
extend the thread of transitivity, from merely marking the passage from
goal pattern of affixation,22
source to goal, to indicating intensive absorption in the goal:
This Malay attention to transitivity has to do, I believe, with the
buku itu dilihat oleh Heru process by which Malay culture came and in some areas, continues to
5
book that di-look by Heru come into being. The earlier Malay states were born out of a tension
The book was looked at by Heru. between "insider" and "outsider" domains of action, experienced by the
Geoffrey Benjamin The cultural and political background to Standard Malay 361
360
people as the constant passing of physical and spiritual goods between "insider"-orientated informal framework has little room for such atten
these domains. The resultant notion of transitivity, institutionalised tion to transitivity, and hence little use for the suffix -kan except in its
through the imposition of a transcendentally oriented cultural order over benefactive meaning, which is still often used.
a series of centralising polities, was to become one of the major compo
nents of the self-conscious culture of Malayness. Indeed, this notion of 3.2 Verbal prefixes
transitivity must underlie the sense of constant "becoming" that Vivienne
Wee 1985 has argued is the fundamental modality through which Malays The prefixes me-, ber- and di- in modern formal Malay are usually
experience their Malayness. considered by grammarians to constitute a paradigmatic set of mutually
Two points about the transitive direct-object use of -kan are of interest exclusive markers of verbal voice, as indicated above. As we shall see,
in this regard. First, although -kan derives from the early Austronesian though, such descriptions probably say more about the grammarians
verbal affix *akan, which was probably employed originally only with theoretical preoccupations than about what motivates a Malay-speaker
an indirect-object, benefactive meaning in active-voice SVO word-order to choose between one affix and another. As usual, it is Bahasa Indonesia
clauses W. A. Foley, personal communication, Malay seems to be the that approaches the "functionalist" grammarians ideas more closely in
only Austronesian language in which this affix has taken on a direct- these respects than does Bahasa Malaysia, and we may therefore take
object patientive "undergoer" meaning. A considerable change in cul Indonesian usage for the moment as a convenient norm. There, the
tural consciousness must underlie such a shift in language use. Further prefixes follow the pattern:
more, this shift appears to be still under way, with something of the old
"benefactive" meaning yet remaining in some speakers minds. Lewis 7 me- "active transitive" or "actor-focus"
1968: 192, for example, translates tutupkan pintu [close-kan door] as ber- "active intransitive" or "middle voice"
close the door for the benefit of the speaker.23 di- "passive transitive" or "patient-focus"
The second point is that Malay seems at some early stage to have
developed the non-affixal independent form akan, presumably out of the These usages may be exemplified in the following affixed forms of the
suffix *akan. The free form akan nowadays expresses a range of meanings root cukur to shave:
in Malay: to; towards; going towards; about to; shall; will Wilkinson
1932 [1959]: 13, all of which imply, in a "localistic" manner Anderson 8 saya mencukur I shave [someone else]
1971, the notion of transitive movement towards a goal. These dictionary saya bercukur I shave [myself]
meanings are, of course, obviously relatable to the original "benefactive" saya dicukur I am shaved [by someone else]
meaning of -kan. But the more recent "patientive" and "causative"
meanings can be linked to the other meanings of -kan/akan only by way 3.2.1 The prefix ter
of the underlying notion of TRANSITIVITY, which appears to be In the modern standard languages, the three prefixes me-, ber- and di-
culturally, and not simply linguistically, motivated. "This reaching-out differ from each other in voice i. e., in the orientation of the predicate
to a person or thing affected by the action is the underlying function towards the subject according as the latter is designated respectively as
of the suffix -kan" Lewis 1952: 151. Actor, Actor/Patient or Patient. But they all share a common emphasis
The suffix -kan appears, then, to fulfil the features expected of a on the processual, intentional, transitive and in-progress character of the
sociolinguistic variable. Unaided, syntactic rules fail to account fully for situations they refer to. It is precisely this meaning of "source-to-goal
its occurrence or non-occurrence. We must turn instead to the notional progress" that is negated by a fourth, and very interesting, verbal prefix,
meaning TRANSITIVITY that it carries if we wish to understand why ter-. Insofar as ter- cancels the sense of "in-progress", it possesses the
the use of -kan implies that the speaker is operating within a formal and "perfected-state" meaning that Winstedt 1927 [1957]: 86-89 saw as
"outsider"-orientated framework. For cultural reasons the alternative underlying its varied uses. Nowadays, grammarians concerned primarily
with the distributional behaviour of morphological elements have treated on the part of the subject but to external compulsion or accident 3
...
ter- as possessing several distinct meanings. Abdullah Hassan 1974: Seeing that in denoting the perfected act the derivative in ter- connotes
106- 107, for example, regards ter- as having three "grammatical func ability to bring it about, Icr- has come to be used to denote the possible or
tions": 1 "active/passive voice non-volitive"; 2 "non-volitive actions more commonly with the help of a negative or an interrogative, the impos
[sic] intransitive"; 3 "comparative and superlative degree" [of adjec sible ... 4 Denoting completion beyond which one cannot go, Icr- deriv
atives connote the superlative in degree and serve as intensitives. In this
tives]. Asmah, acknowledging meaning Asmah 1975: 181, says ter connection ter- is prefixed to nouns, adjectives, and adverbs, as well as
"denotes non-intention, capability and the perfective aspect"; she does verbs.
not, however, say anything to suggest whether these meanings are either
distinct or in some way the same. Abdullah 1974: 107, coining a special
3.3 The verbal-"voice" prefixes
portmanteau term, characterises ter- as marking "active/passive voice
non-volitive". Thus, tercukur [ter-shave] shaved can, in principle at Whatever the source and possible earlier meanings of ter-, it has ended
least, mean any of the following: unintentionally shaved by someone
up in the modern formal language as a component element of the
else; unintentionally shaved by oneself; unintentionally made to shave paradigmatic set consisting of the "voice/valency"; subject-orientation
someone else; shaven as opposed to still being shaved; able to shave prefixes me- active; ber- middle and di- passive. If this is true, then it
someone else or oneself; able to be shaved. is probably true also that the prefixes me-, ber-, and di- have undergone
Now, it is unlikely that such a range of functions could have come a similar evolutionary process. Their present-day status as syntactic-
together syncretically in a single affix unless they possessed some meaning function markers is the result of their having been standardised into a
in common: as Wierzbicka puts it Wierzbicka 1981: 59, "all systematic single paradigmatic set, where previously they were independent elements
syncretisms should be noted with utmost care in an overall description used optionally for whatever nuance of meaning they could bring to an
of any language, and ... explanations for them should be sought." utterance.
Moreover, it is unlikely that any common meaning would be picked out These standardisation processes, however, have had a deep effect only
for special linguistic attention unless it connected in some significant way upon the most formal varieties of the language precisely those varieties
-
with important cultural or social concerns. The prefix ter-, in bringing that linguists have usually chosen to study when writing Malay grammars.
together the notions of non-intention, capability and perfective-static In all other varieties of the language, and particularly in the various
aspect, implies that ones capabilities are a state that one enters not by local-Malay dialects, the verbal prefixes are still used as optional elements,
intending. This is a restatement, in the substance of the language, of the carrying a wider range or meanings than they do in formal Malay. Some
normative Malay view that the course of ones life depends on the will of these meanings appear, moreover, to be quite incompatible with the
of God or of ones rulers, and that one can do little to alter it. Such a particular "voice" allocations they are supposed to mark in formal Malay.
view is most likely to have entered Malay cultural consciousness as part Lewis 1968: 212-213 gives two nice examples of such modern nuance-
of the shift to a transcendental cultural regime through which Malaydom expressing optional usages of me- and ter-, from the written language in
itself came into being. For further discussion of the culture-historical this case:
aspects of this shift, see Benjamin 1985.24
Winstedt, in his thoughtful Malay Grammar 1927: 86-89, shows 9 A writer speaks of "slanders falling-thick-as-leaves-of-the-
how this basic non-agentive meaning leads connotatively to the other forest". The expression he uses is:
mendaun kayu
meanings of ter- thereby providing an answer to the puzzles engendered
[me-N-leaf tree]
by later grammarians accounts: behaving as leaves behave
1 The prefix ter- denotes the perfected act, the realized condition. 2 It
emphasises not a process in which an agent takes part but a result 10 A suspected poultry-stealer is told that the thief has a feather
-
absolutely complete, sometimes sudden and due not to conscious activity sticking to his hair, and his hand at once goes up to his head.
The expression is:
terjabat kepala-nya dengan tangan nesia, me-N- is usually treated simply as the obverse of the "passive-
[ter-grasp head-his with hand] voice" or "object-focus" marker di-; it is regarded accordingly as the
marker of "active voice" or of "subject-focus". But in colloquial Malay,
The writer shows, by the prefix, that it was an involuntary action. The
matters are more complicated, for me- is only infrequently used there
word jabat to grasp, clasp would not be shown in any dictionary with
with a specifically "active-voice" function; and when it is so used it
a ter- prefix, but that is exactly what is needed in this sentence Lewis
1968: 212-213. implies that great emphasis is being placed on the agent. Typically, this
will be immediately following yang who, which, or ada exist used as
Lewis maintains that "on the whole affixation, especially verbal affix an affirmative modal verb, as in these examples from Winstedt 1927:
ation, is a live process which lends to a root-word a temporary particu 21:
larisation of aspect."25 This is very different from the tightly ordered,
functional treatment of the verbal affixes in terms of "voice" or "focus"
11 aku yang membuat
that linguists have usually found appropriate for analysing modern I who me-N-do
Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia. These differences in approach,
I was the doer of the deed.
it seems to me, reflect authentic differences in the grammatical organi
sation of the several Malay varieties even more than they reflect changes
in scholarly fashion. or
As stated earlier, verbal morphology in colloquial and "insider"-ori
entated Malay is, in general, more concerned with marking Aktionsart 12 ada dia membuat
and aspect reflecting the inherent or temporal properties of the process exist he me-N-do
or state referred to by the verb than with marking the grammatical He did do it.
relations holding between the verb and its subject- or object-complement.
As Asmah 1975: 13 says of the Kedah-Malay colloquial where verbs The main and perhaps only regularly productive usage of me- in
usually appear in the root-form, colloquial Malay is as an optional connective element in serial-verb
when a verb gets a prefix, it means that a specific concept such as duration, constructions, between the qualifying verb and the phrase it qualifies.
habituality, causality or the like is incorporated into the meaning borne by Lewis 1952: 144 calls this the "verb-adjective use of the me-derivative".
the root ... The verb in Kedah dialect does not take a prefix merely in In non-imperative serial-verb utterances me- is especially frequent after
relation to its grammatical function ... Verbal prefixes which help to mark a verb of motion, as in
a subject-focus or object-focus sentence are nonexistent in this dialect.
Speaking more generally, and with historical issues in mind, Becker 13 pergi membeli
1979: 249 warns that "a major source of the difficulty in describing go me-N-buy
these affixes has been that discourse strategies have changed rapidly in go, buying
the past few hundred years of the history of Malay and with them the
-
semantics of the verb affix systems." Awareness of these differences will But it can be used just as appropriately with other kinds of verb, as in
help in understanding the wide range of meanings and uses covered by the following examples from Lewis 1952: 166:
the prefixes me- and ber-, to which we now turn. 26
14 kerja membuat rumah
3.3.1 The prefixes me- and -N work me-N-build house
The key element here is the prefix me-, and the associated nasalising to work at building a house
morphophoneme -N-, which have occasioned much uncertainty in the
writing of Malay grammars. In descriptions of standard Bahasa Indo or
15 saya terpikir mengatakan the dividing line falls equally between the two verbs, thus: verb-mle-verb.
I ter-think me-N-say-kan But in agentive constructions of the form agent-me-verb, the dividing line
I had a thought, saying will fall according as whether the semantic articulation of the speakers
ideas is event-orientated as in the less formal, "insider"-oriented varieties
One of the most telling examples of the use of me- that I have come or participant-orientated as in the more formal "outsider"-orientated
across in the grammatical literature is the contrast drawn by Lewis 1952: varieties. 28
183 between:
3.3.1.2 Me- in event-salient varieties
16 nanti mak pergi panggil In the more colloquial kinds of local Malay "peasant Malay", let us
-
presently mother go call call them - the event is salient, so that if me- is used at all it is attracted
Presently mother will go and then call. semantically to the verb, thus: agent-me-verb. When this occurs, the me-
functions by modifying the signification of the verb, making "more" of
and it than of the agent. Kedah peasant-Malay Asmah 1985: 194-202
provides evidence for this by employing me- aspectually, to give an
17 mak saya pergi memanggil "habitual" meaning to the action denoted by the verb:
mother I go me-N-call
my mother went, calling 18 aku menanam padi
I me-N-plant rice
Of the second sentence, Lewis says the two actions are "the result of one I am a rice-farmer by occupation.
impulse", thus quite properly feeding subjective concerns into gram
matical interpretation.27 This usage is all the more striking for being the only use of me- in the
Kedah colloquial. Furthermore, it is the reverse of normal textbook-
3.3.1.1 Me- as a sociolinguistic variable
Malay usage, which prescribes the middle-voice expression:
Let us now examine how the meanings and usage of me- vary with the
social and cultural context. The Malay dialect-continuum ranges between
the more "condensed", insider-orientated, event-salient varieties and the 19 aku bertanam padi
more "articulated", outsider-orientated, participant-salient ones. So far I ber-plant rice
as the contemporary forms of spoken Malay are concerned, this dine
corresponds closely to the sociolinguistic gradation that extends from the for the "habitual-occupation" meaning, with menanam restricted to such
local-Malay colloquials of the tribal and peasant communities, through specific-action meanings as "I have just planted some rice".29
the rather more articulated speech and written language of Malay intel My own enquiries have suggested that the "habitual-occupation" mean
lectuals and aristocrats, to the standardised national languages of Malay ing of the me-N- form of the verb is found in other Malay communities,
sia and Indonesia. This gradation is at its most apparent in the varying too, especially where the influence of the standard language is relatively
semantics of me- affixation. slight because of illiteracy or isolation. This might account for the fact
If as I have already suggested we take the basic function of me- in that some Malays have been reported as in Asmahs statement quoted
colloquial local Malay to be that of a verbal connective in serial verb- at the beginning of this paper as simply unable to understand the meaning
me-verb constructions, then the various meanings and functions of me- or function of me- as it is used on radio and television in Malaysia. In
found in the other varieties of Malay will relate to the relative salience the Malay-speaking Riau islands of western Indonesia, there are regular
of the remaining sentence constituents: the more salient constituent will oppositions of this sort: pancing to go line-fishing for fun as Malay
"attract" the me- to itself as a modifier. In verb-me-verb constructions, children might versus memancing to go line-fishing as an occupation;
tombak to spear fish versus menombak to spear fish for sale examples both of which mean I build a fine house, Verguin 1967: 63 says
supplied by Vivienne Wee.
These differences in the use of me- relate as much to cultural context, Dans lun et dans lautre cas le sujet aku est lagent, mais dans le premier
I suggest, as to grammar. The difference between the local-Malay choice cas le rapport sujet-prdicat nest pas marqu et ressort de la position des
lments aku et buat; dans le second cas par contre le rapport est marqu,
of menanam to express being a rice-farmer and the standard-Malay mais la position des lments nen est pas pourtant modifiable. Du point de
choice of bertanam for that same meaning is a matter of marking. When vue strictement fonctionnel, on dira donc que le monme me- est ici une
peasants just tanam plant something in their kitchen-garden they are redondance ayant, comme il se doit, une incidence expressive.39
doing one of the many things they are expected to do. But when they
menanam plant as a full-time occupation, they are doing something From this characterisation, it is easy to see why some grammarians
remarkable, for many Malay peasant communities are still in process of treat me- as the inflectional marker of "active voice". But Abdullah
accepting such wage labour as the norm. On the other hand, when Hassan 1974: 102 states categorically, as remarked earlier, that the use
modern-minded, town-dwelling speakers of standard Malay do some of me- with transitive verbs is "optional" because, he suggests, "active
simple weekend menanam hobby-planting in their front garden, they do voice" is the "least marked" verbal voice in Malay. This lends support
so because they choose to as individual selves. If, however, they bertanam to my view that, in "Raja Malay" and other formal varieties not influ
plant as a job, their selves are subsumed in the labour that runs their enced by Bahasa Indonesia or by the more recent standardising changes
life and in which they losing their individuality. The "determinate" prefix in Bahasa Malaysia, me- marks the agent rather than the verb. Nor is
me-N- is far less appropriate to this latter, more alienated, way of viewing verbal "voice" the most appropriate grammatical category to apply in
things than is the much more "indeterminate" ber-, for in a society still this case. It is closer to a Malay-speakers notions, I suspect, to treat me-
in the early stages of becoming modern and industrial it is the willed and the other affixes such as -kan, discussed earlier as distinct mean
individual act that deserves special marking as such. ingful elements in their own right, not necessarily possessing any formal
syntactic function of the "voice" kind. This accords with Foleys assertion
3.3.1.3 Me- in participant-salient varieties
Foley 1974: 29, based on an examination of comparative Austronesian
In the more formal varieties of present-day Malay including Bahasa
materials, that "one of the striking features of Malay morphology is the
Malaysia or in the kind of Malay associated with the royal courts let
confusion in the usage of morphemes, so that many have a patchquilt of
us call it "Raja Malay" the agent, which is usually expressed by some
multiple uses."
kind of status-term, is more salient than the verb. The me- is, accordingly,
In written Bahasa Malaysia me- is treated as optional; but it appears
attracted to the agent-participant, thus: agent-mel-verb. The me- now
to have lost this character in written Indonesian, where syntactic for
makes "more" of the agent than of the verb. It is this, presumably, that
malism has overrun the semantics. There, me- contrasts paradigmatically
has led some French grammarians of Malay, under the influence of
with the "passive" prefix di- as the marker of agent-focus "active" voice,
Martinets "functional" ideas, to treat me- as a positive but optional
thus:
marker of subject-orientation. For example, in accounting for the differ
ence between: me
Subject Verb
20 aku buat rumah elok
I build house fine di
and Now, Bahasa Indonesia, unlike Bahasa Malaysia, is spoken and written
almost entirely as a second language by its more than 170 million users;
21 aku membuat rumah elok as a first language, it is spoken mainly by a few ethnic Chinese in Java
I me-N-build house fine Weldon 1972. At home, the countrys ethnic Malays usually speak
instead some variety of local Malay. This "second-language" character other major verbal prefix of Malay, ber-, the semantic variability of which
removes from Bahasa Indonesia a major constraint against the reshaping also demands a sociolinguistic approach if it is to be successfully incor
and explicit reformulation of its grammar for the purposes of language- porated into a proper grammatical description of Malay.
planning. And just such a reshaping seems to have taken place, for
Bahasa Indonesia has taken on a distinctly "modern" and "European" 3.3.2 The prefix ber
feel, in that it has become obligatory for almost all verbs that can be so 3.3.2.1 Ber- in participant-salient varieties
marked, to carry voice-marking prefixes: me- for "active" or "agent- In the modern participant-salient varieties of Malay i. e., Bahasa Malay
focus" depending on who is writing the grammatical account and di- sia and Bahasa Indonesia ber- is regularly affixed to verb-, adjective-,
for "passive" or "patient-focus". numeral- and noun-stems to form verbal constructions expressing a range
This formalisation appears to have resulted from the desire of Indo of apparently distinct "functions" and "meanings". In modern reference
nesian standard-language speakers to allow no ambiguity as to which and pedagogical grammars of the standard languages these meanings
words in the lexicon are nouns and which are verbs. A naked verb stem are usually just listed: little attempt is made to characterise what holds
such as is common in all other varieties of Malay, where it has occasioned them together under the same affix. A very full list of such meanings
some linguistic puzzlement is regarded as meaningless at the standard- makna for ber- is provided by Asmah 1982: 110-113, as follows. I
language level, and as needing additional morphological marking before
have translated Asmahs list from the original Malay.
it can be interpreted. This intolerance of word-class ambiguity betokens
a much more "articulated" mode of language-organisation than is found With verbs: to do or bring about something:
in other varieties of Malay. Here, articulation has not only affected the i with other people: bermain to play;
idiom of the language but it has led also to the explicit formulating of ii upon or to oneself: bercukur to shave;
the grammar with the aim of making it a suitable subject for teaching in iii as a matter of normality: bertenun to be a weaver.
schools, and as similar as possible to other familiar national languages
here, Dutch or English. Hence the Standard-Indonesian predilection for With adjectives:
making a clear distinction between nouns and verbs, between transitive iv possessing the feeling or characteristic referred to: berduka to be
and intransitive, and between active and passive, just as happens in most sorrowful.
European languages. Compare this with what Roy Harris has to say With nouns:
1980: 20-21. v to produce, give...: berpeluh to sweat;
The conscious classification of words into parts of speech, according to their vi to use or wear...: berkuda to be on horseback;
form and grammatical function, which is reflected in the metalinguistic vii to possess...: berkawan to hake he friends;
vocabulary of all European languages is, by contrast, a feature almost viii to take or have someone as...: herbapa to have as father;
entirely lacking in many non-European languages. Usually such classifica ix to work at...: berkebun to be a gardener;
tions, as the history of grammatical doctrines in Europe well illustrates, are
the work originally of a small class of language experts. But the experts x to work as...: berkuli to work as a labourer;
concept of a language may well, by processes of cultural transmission, xi to attend at..., to undertake...: bersekolah to attend school.
become integrated into the linguistic consciousness of a whole community.
With language, as with medicine, or religion, what began as a set of To these examples may be added the use of ber- with numerals:
specialists distinctions can become part of the intellectual equipment of xii in ns: berdua in twos.
every man.
The first thing to note about this list of meanings is that it is reducible.
The prefix me- is, then, a typical sociolinguistic feature, and any attempt If we label i, ii and iii respectively as "social", "reflexive" and
to treat it solely as a grammatical formative is bound to be more tortuous "habitual" we can subsume most of the other meanings under one or
than need be. I would like now to suggest that the same holds for the more of these three basic verbal meanings.
First, as is emphasised in all modern grammatical studies, her- char This "intransitivity" of her- seems, however, to be at least as much
acteristically marks as "intransitive" the construction in which it occurs. semantic as syntactic, motivated more by considerations of meaning than
This is true even in cases where the verb is followed by an apparently by the requirements of sentence-construction. Semantically, ber- is the
object-like participant, as in the following example from Macdonald 1976: antithesis of the suffix -kan discussed earlier. Where -kan positively marks
46: an event as proceeding unidirectionally from the domain of the source
to the domain of an external goal, ber- marks an event as somehow not
22 botol itu berisi air panas proceeding beyond itself to any external goal outside of the source. There
bottle that her-contents water hot are several possible ways of handling this property of ber- within the
That bottle contains hot water. terms of modern grammatical frameworks. The most commonly chosen
is, as remarked, to treat it as "intransitive"; another has been to regard
According to Macdonalds analysis, the conventional orthography can it as "object-incorporating". But these approaches are too narrowly
trap the unwary into assuming a Subject Verb Object construction
- - concerned with the syntactic property of valency i. e., with indicating the
instead of the Subject Verb construction it really is. The her- here
- number of "arguments" or participants borne by the verb to serve the
governs a single compound nominal phrase, which would in a syntax- purposes of this paper. Naylors "centripetal" versus "centrifugal" action
reflecting orthography be written hyphenated: Naylor 1978: 405 or Benvenistes "internal" versus "external" diathesis
Benveniste 1971: 150 would be more appropriate categorisations. These
23 berisi-air-panas possess the merit of proceeding from meaning to syntax, rather than in
bercontents-water-hot the reverse direction, as the term "intransitive" implies.
Among modern grammarians of Malay, Verguin 1967: 64 comes
In other words, this sentence is not about any transitive effects the closest to summarising the semantic value of her- as a syntactic marker.
bottle may have on the hot water, but about the hot-water-containing His approach is to treat ber- along with me- and di- as a marker of the
circumstances of the bottle itself. Another of Macdonalds examples, this mode of orientation of the predicate to the subject. I quote Verguin at
time with a verb-root, makes the same point; it concerns the contrast some length so as to give the reader a feel for his Martinet-derived
between menanam padi and bertanam padi to plant rice that we met "functional" approach, remarkably close to more recent, but apparently
earlier. In: otherwise unrelated, essays in relational grammar.
24 dia menanam padi ber- introduit un rapport particulier par opposition a me- ou au theme nu
he me-N-plant rice employ comme prdicat... Avec buat make, construct, nous aurons un
nonc independent tukang buat rumah itu louvrier construit cette maison,
the meaning at least, in modern standard Bahasa Malaysia or Bahasa buat tant un prdicat lexme nu. On pourrait avoir galement tukang
Indonesia is the transitive statement he plants rice. The me-N- prefix membuat rumah itu, sans modification appreciable du sens, mais avec marque
expressive du rapport sujet-prdicat au moyen du prfixe me-. Enfin on
here implies that padi rice is the object-participant and undergoing the pourra avoir toujours a partir de buat faire: tukang berbuat rumah itu
source-marked subjects actions. But in: louvrier se fait cette maison. Des lors si lon considre quavec un prdicat
non marqu ou un prdicat en me- le rapport entre le sujet et le prdicat
25 dia bertanam padi quivaut a une orientation du prdicat vers le sujet-agent, on retiendra que
he her-plant rice ber- marque une orientation du prdicat vers le sujet-agent et bnficiaire.
En dautres termes her- implique que, sur le plan smantique de lnonc, le
He makes a living by planting rice. sujet assume un double role, quil est doublement intress; le terme bene
ficiaire devant tre pris au sens large. 31
the her- prefix indicates that the subject dia he is characterised by the
activity of tanam-padi "rice-planting"; there is no acted-upon object in This analysis of the prefix ber- corresponds to the notion of "middle
the speakers mind. voice", much employed by older generations of grammarians brought up
on Ancient Greek or Sanskrit cf. Benveniste 1971; Lyons 1968: 372. can undergo inflection to a middle-voice cum "anticausative" form.
But the term "middle voice" is also applicable to morphological features This contravenes Comries assertion that "one cannot iteratively reduce
in languages quite other than the classical Indo-European dialects. In the the degree of transitivity of a predicate" once it has been made intran
Malay Peninsula, for example, two of the Aslian i. e., Peninsular Mon sitive. I suggest, however, that an intransitive predicate can indeed be
Khmer languages, Temiar and Lanoh, possess a productive and fully further reduced in valency - semantically, at least - by regarding its
inflectional marking of middle voice in the verb Benjamin in preparation, grammatical subject as referring to an entity that is somehow psycho
socially divided within itself while still retaining its syntactically unitary
b and so also, according to Winstedt 1927: 80, does Malay, insofar as
her- fits that mould to a considerable extent. Let me quote Winstedt here properties. This, it seems to me, is exactly the meaning indicated by the
in extenso, for his semantically sensitive approach brings us much closer Malay prefix her- in the examples and discussion presented earlier. Here
to a deeper understanding of the prefix her- than the more formalistic is yet another instance where such matters as transitivity and valency
and distributional approaches favoured in many recent studies: cannot be relegated to syntax alone, for they relate just as much to
semantics, and hence to culture.
Ber- forms a middle voice, the Greek middle is midway between the active In reflexive predicates, e. g., saya bercukur [I her-shave] I shave myself,
voice, in which the subject does something to an object and the passive in the psychosocial division is obvious: the subject is simultaneously the
which something is done to the subject. The subject is represented as acting agent and patient, the source and goal, of its own actions. Social predi
on himself: berchukor shave oneself; for himself: bersimpan [ber-pack] cates, such as kita bermain [we her-play] we play together, involve a
pack up for oneself; mari-lah kita bersimpan segala perkakas kita [come psychosocially divided subject too, and not merely a plural one, for each
EXCLAM we ber-pack all belongings we] come let us pack up our belong
ings; or with reference to himself: berpukul, bertumbok [ber-hit, ber-beat] component agent is acting with direct reference to the other agents: the
fight and take blows; or for an object which belongs to himself: berbuat subject not only acts but interacts. In habitual predicates, such as dia
astana raja [her- make palace prince] make a palace for ones prince; bertenun [he/she her-weave] he/she is a weaver, the subject is divided
berbuang kuku [her-discard nails] cut ones nails. The Malay prefix expresses temporally rather than by agentivity, being characterised as a composite
the closely allied ideas of reflexive and reciprocal action, of repetition where
something is added to the original, of connection between one person or of his or her indefinitely repeated separate appearances as performer of
thing and another, and of possession by oneself. It is to be noted that the the action. The same meanings are also apparent in the various expres
derivatives need not bear one only of these meanings, that berkata [her- sions formed by prefixing her- to adjectives, nouns or numerals. To wear
word], for example, may mean have ones say, speak man to man, speak a hat bertopi [her-hat] or to ride in a train berkeretapi [her-train], for
all together according to context; tiada berlawan [not her-contest] not example, is to use something in a manner that affects oneself, and hence
fighting one another or not having a peer, peerless; bernyanyi [ber-sing]
singing ones song, singing one to another, singing all together; the division to engage in a reflexive activity. Inalienable possession e. g. berbapa [her-
into classes is only an artificial way of viewing different aspects of the one father] to have as a father or customary role e. g., berkuli [ber-coolie]
central function. to be a labourer are habitual conditions of life. And to be friends
berkawan [her-friend] or to go two together, in twos berdua [her-two] is
Just what is the "one central function" that unites these various mean to be socially orientated.
ing-classes of her-? Modern linguists concerned with the middle voice
3.3.2.2 The middle voice and the active-passive axis
have tended to place emphasis on its valency-reducing properties: where
As Winstedt quoting from some undisclosed textbook of Greek gram
the causative such as Malay per- increases a verbs valency so that it
mar acknowledged, the middle voice was originally so called because it
takes one more argument or participant, the middle voice reduces its
was thought of as occupying the middle ground between the active and
valency so that it becomes necessarily intransitive. Such an approach
underlies, for example, Comries covert discussion Comrie 1981: 161 of the passive voices. Although this image has since been modified by the
the middle voice under the rubric of "anticausative". But the matter counterclaim that, at least in Indo-European, the middle voice was
cannot be one of valency alone, for there exist languages Temiar
-
somehow historically and semantically prior to the passive Lehmann
among them - in which even intransitive verb-stems like "sit" or "run" 1974, Benveniste 1971: 145, it is nevertheless widely recognised that
middle-voice forms of the verb often come to take on a passive semantic still thinking of the letter, but with some consciousness of the agent;
coloration. According to Lehmann this is especially likely to occur in a
language that develops a causative inflection in its verbal paradigm. Now, 31 Siapa yang membuka surat ni?
despite the very great differences between Malay and the classical Indo who REL me-N-open letter this
European languages, something of the kind seems to have happened in Who opened this letter?
Malay too. Several authors have noted how her-derivatives are often best
translated into passive expressions in English. Winstedt tells us 1927: thinking first of the agent; contrast with the above examples the follow
80 that "sentences show ... dual uses" of her-, sometimes to indicate the ing sentence, where berbuka is used as an active verb:
"active middle" and sometimes the "passive middle":
32 Awak dah berbuka puasa?
26 bertumbok beras you COMPLET her-open fast
her-pound rice Have you broken your fast?
pounding rice
i. e. had your meal, during the fasting month.
versus
This two-faced character of the her-inflected middle voice is the direct
27 beras yang bertumbok outcome, I suggest, of the emphasis placed upon transitivity and source/
rice which her-pound goal relations in the participant-salient varieties of Malay. Transitivity-
pounded rice marking depends on a clear identification of separate source- and goal
participants. Ber- however, when functioning as the marker of middle
Lewis 1952: 167 provides a particularly telling set of spoken-Malay voice, implies the merging of source and goal in a single grammatical
examples contrasting the passive usage of her- with the ter- and me- subject. Transitivity-emphasising expressions are based on a "passive"/
forms of the verb. The translations and parenthetical comments are from "active"/"causative" di-/me-/per- categorisation of events; but these
Lewiss text; the word-for-word glosses are added.: categories are simply irrelevant. i. e. neutralised, in middle-voice expres
sions. This, presumably, is why many modern grammarians of Malay as
28 Surat tu dah berbuka-kah remarked earlier feel obliged to treat her- as marking the "intransitive",
letter that completive ber-open-INTERROG in opposition to the transitive axis marked by me- and di-. In this, they
belum are not entirely wrong; but they are missing the point. Although most
not-yet her-marked verbs are undeniably intransitive as regards their syntactic
Has that letter been opened? relations, her- does not mean "intransitive" in anything like the same
sense as, in modern standard Malay, me- and di- mean "transitive".
implying perhaps that somebody ought to be attending to it; The interpretation of a her-prefixed verb as active or passive is a
consequence of several factors. Not least of these is whether the speaker
29 Saya terima surat tu dah terbuka is interested in such a distinction at all. As Lewis puts it 1952: 183, the
speakers mind may be focused primarily on "the present state of the
I receive letter that COMPLET ter-open
When I got the letter it was already open. person or thing to which the her-derivative is attached as an attribute",
as in
30 Saya terima surat itu - dah berbuka
33 kakinya berbalut
I receive letter that COMPLET her-open
-
foot-his her-wrap
The letter had been opened before I got it. His foot was bandaged.
taking or giving: Sanskrit dti he gives: adte he receives; Greek mist8oun

Here the her- form is entirely appropriate; the passive interpretation is a to give on hire: mistost"ai to take on hire; daneizein to lend: daneIzest6ai
figment of translating the expression into English, a language which in to borrow: Latin heel the object is put up for auction: hicetur the man
its standard version, at least imposes an active/passive distinction on stands as buyer. We should notice these are important notions when human
statements of this kind. If the speaker had intended an expressly passive relations are based on the reciprocity of public or private services in a society
interpretation referring more to an action than a state, then in which one must commit oneself in order to obtain something. [Emphasis
added.]
34 kakinya dibalut
foot-his di-wrap Insofar as Benveniste is here discussing the disappearance of the inflected
His foot was bandaged. middle voice his "internal diathesis" from the later Indo-European
languages as social changes took place, he is implicitly proposing the
would have served. This expression employs the canonical "passive" prefix hypothesis that an overt middle-voice morphology is more likely to be
di- which cannot be treated here, despite its great relevance to the present in a language if it is spoken in a community that follows a
argument. dialectically orientated cultural regime in its public life. As increasing
It is sometimes suggested by commentators on the Malay-speaking transcendentalisation of consciousness takes place, the semantic salience
scene, that the her-inflected middle-voice form of the verb is nowadays of the "internal/external diathesis" axis in a language is likely to be
employed much less frequently than in the past. Folk-wisdom in Malaysia supplanted by an active/passive semantic axis. While the evidence for the
holds that this is especially true of the verb nyanyi sing, the me-prefixed existence of a dialectically orientated regime in proto- or pre-Malay
form of which, it is claimed, is a preferred in Indonesian usage over the society would place it very far back in time Benjamin 1985, there is
her- form still often used in Malaysia, and/or b currently replacing the little doubt that developments over the last two millennia have led to the
her- form even in Malaysia. The dictionaries usually state simply that increasing transcendentalisation of Malay polities. At present this tran
bernyanyi and menyanyi both mean sing which indeed they do; but,
- scendentalisation is a quite self-conscious process, the fulfillment of which
as anyone who followed my argument this far will realise, they are unlikely is expressly urged by many Malay-speaking intellectuals. Foremost
to mean exactly the same thing. Winstedt, as already quoted, provides a among these is the Indonesian social philosopher and linguist S. Takdir
clue to this sociolinguistic puzzle: bernyanyi singing ones song, singing Alisjahbana who was for a time the Professor of Malay Studies at the
one to another, singing all together a manner of singing well suited
- University of Malaya.32 Among his several statements on how the
to the much more socially reciprocal conditions under which song-per Indonesian language should be standardised to suit a more modern
formances took place in pre-modern times. But nowadays when a singer worldview is the following Alisjahbana 1978: 35-36, in which he
gets up to sing, she is usually singing someone elses song to an audience provides a commentary, from a rather different standpoint, on the topic
of "others" who have in effect hired her services. This highly transitive just discussed:
situation demands to be labeled menyanyi, not bernyanyi. As I remarked
earlier, Bahasa Indonesia spoken almost entirely by outsider-orientated
- the difference between the two prefixes [me- and her-] is very clear. Ber
non-"natives" has gone furthest along this modernising, transitivising,
- expresses more: having and being in a situation, while the prefix me-
path: in such a language-variety, bernyanyi would seem a hopelessly creates words which are nearer to the Indo-German active transitive verbs.
unsophisticated and old-fashioned way of "singing". A comparison between a classical text like the Hikayat Sen Rama and a
modern novel like Layar Terkembang shows the clear tendency in modern
Behind this single example lurks a more general sociolinguistic issue. Indonesian to use more active predicate words with the prefix me- than with
Benveniste makes the following remarks 1971: 157 at the end of his the prefix her-, which functions more like an adjective. This tendency of the
discussion of the middle voice in the ancient Indo-European languages change of the predicate from the description of a situation to the description
the second of each pair of cited words is in the middle voice: of an activity runs parallel with the social tendency of the individualisation
and dynamisation of the individual subject in Indonesian culture today
through this diathesis [i. e. the middle voice], lexical oppositions have found through the influence of modern culture. In this line of reasoning a guideline
their way into verbs able to indicate by a variation in their endings either is found for the decision in alternatives, where two predicate words with
different prefixes are used for nearly the same function and meaning, e. g. with Standard Malay
the forms bernyanyi and menyanyi are used in Indonesia to express the same
meaning: to sing. Menyanyi is used more and more, and is according to 38 bertumbuk-tumbukan
the line of reasoning above also preferable to bernyanyi.33 ber-punch-punch-an
3.3.2.3 Ber- in event-salient varieties to punch one another.34
In event-salient varieties the "psychosocially divided subject" meaning
just discussed merges into a range of aspectual and Aktionsart meanings The difference between these expressions is intriguing, for it implies that
that characterise the quality of the event or state itself, rather than the the locus of the "reciprocal" meaning is differently situated in the two
manner of the subjects involvement in it. Some hint of this can be found verb-forms. Since bertumbuk would without further qualification usually
even in more formal varieties of Malay, as with the "habitual" and mean to punch or having been punched, the "reciprocal" component
"stative" meanings that her- sometimes imparts to an otherwise action- in bertumbuk-tumbukan must reside in the verbal reduplication plus the
referring verb. Among the examples discussed earlier are suffix -an. The semantic power of the reduplication tumbuk-tumbuk is
clearly iconic, meaning blow upon blow or exchange of blows. The
35 bertanam padi -an, which derives historically either from Proto-Austronesian *..an goal
her-plant rice focus or *..an locative focus Dahl 1973: 119, adds a passive coloration.
to plant rice as ones occupation Thus, the verb stem - which has actually now become a nominal35 -
probably means undergoing blow upon blow or being punched by the

and other. If this interpretation is correct, it implies that here her- is not
strictly a verbal prefix after all, but a prepositional one the view of Lewis
36 berbuka 1969: 7. If so, the whole expression means something like characterised
ber-open. by being punched by the other. With a dual-number subject, this would
standing open of necessity be understood as referring to a reciprocal situation.
Clearly though, no such analysis can apply to the Kedah peasant-
These usages are still interpretable in terms of the "psychosocially divided Malay form bertumbuk, where the her- must be a true verbal prefix
subject" meaning that applies within the basically participant-salient implying the meaning "reciprocal". I say "implying" because Asmah goes
framework of modern formal Malay, but they point towards some rather on to say that these "reciprocal" verbs are usually followed by the
different semantic possibilities that have actually been reported for her- pronominal expression hang aku you and I, which serves even in third-
in other varieties of Malay. Unfortunately, the literature on this is sparse, person predicates! as the adjunctival each other phrase. If no such
so I am able to present only a few examples of the variants that exist. phrase were present, or if there were no other contextual indication that
Asmah reports 1985: 204-206 that the only functions of her- in the subject was dual in number, the verb bertumbuk would probably be
Kedah peasant Malay are to express a "reciprocity" and b "action interpreted as merely continuative or non-punctual. I am suggesting, in
without specificity of purpose or target". The use of her- to indicate other words, that even in "reciprocal" verbs in this dialect her- functions
reciprocity is also found in Standard Malay, but it is increasingly usual as an indicator of verbal Aktionsart rather than of participant-orientation.
in the modern language for the "reciprocal" meaning to be intensified It is precisely this "continuative, non-punctual" meaning that must
through reduplicating the verb-root and following it by the suffix -an: underlie the second of the two meanings without specificity of purpose
compare Kedah peasant Malay Asmah 1985: 204 or target that Asmah ascribes to the Kedah peasant Malay use of her-.
An action thought of as punctual or non-continuing is very likely also
37 bertumbuk to be thought of as having ended, because it has achieved the agents
her-punch intention. It is hardly surprising then that, per contra, actions specially
to punch one another marked by the use of her- as being "non-punctual" or "continuative"
should come to be interpretable as "without specificity of purpose or Minangkabau dialect of Malay, spoken in West Sumatra.36 Moussay
target". The meanings of her- in Kedah peasant-Malay thus remain 1981: 54 reports that in Minangkabau, ha- the equivalent to her- is
recognisably continuous with the wider range of meanings it exhibits in used only to express the "incompletive" and intransitive "habitual"
Standard Malay. meanings. Minangkabau ha- thus appears to be semantically very close
This view is supported by the fact that at least one other local-Malay in usage to the meN- prefix in Kedah peasant Malay as Asmah describes
dialect - that of Ulu Muar Hendon 1966: 76-81 is reported as
- it. This must have some bearing on the history of both prefixes, but there
employing her- to express almost the full range of meanings that I have is no space to explore the issue further here.
discussed so far. Among Hendons sub-categories of her- usages he writes It is not too difficult to see how the wide range of surface meanings
it ho-. is the following 1966: 76-77, which is very similar to what reported for her- might have been generated. As the diagram in Figure 2
Asmah reports for Kedah peasant Malay usage. shows, this could have come about as the result of a series of implicational
connections, branching out from the "psychosocially divided subject"
The subject performs the action, but there is either no goal involved at all meaning.
or the goal is conceived of as something rather vague and undifferentiated
in the specific identity of which there is no interest; this form contrasts with
the active with the prefix {mO-} [i. e. me-], which usually supposes even
when the goal is not overtly expressed a particular identifiable goal. The
meaning of the derivative with {bd-} is sometimes idiomatic. There is usually
no overt expression of a goal:
bkaja chases around, runs fast there is nothing that the actor is trying to
catch:
mjaja chases, tries to catch some specific person or animal...
bkirin sends money with a friend who is going shopping with the request
that the friend purchase something for him: m?,inin sends something
specific.
But in addition to these Aktionsart-like meanings this dialect also exhibits

a full range of canonical "psychosocially divided subject", middle voice
meanings. Of these, only one the "reciprocal" Hendon 1966: 77
- -
is also reported for Kedah peasant Malay: "The subject performs the
action upon himself as goal, or has the action performed by someone
else upon himself; or the subject is engaged in a reciprocal performance
of the action with someone else, or the members of a plural subject
perform the action upon one another."
There is one usage, however, that Hendon does not report for Ulu
Muar Malay hO-, namely, the repeated performance of an action as an Figure 2. The meanings of ber-.
occupation or profession. Since this is a very typical use of her- as a
verbal prefix in modern Standard Malay, its omission here is of some
interest, for it leaves an almost uniformly egocentric coloration to the
meanings of her- [ho-] in this variety, spoken as it was by a non-literate Further light is shed on this possibility by evidence from Temiar, the
peasant woman more than thirty years ago Hendon 1966: xv. non-Austronesian language already referred to, which is spoken in close
Information on the use of her- in other Peninsular dialects is hard to proximity to Malay in northern Peninsular Malaysia. Temiar possesses
find in the literature, so my final reference is taken instead from the two distinct morphs, bar- -..bar- and bar-, which are almost certainly
derived from Malay her- or something very like it. The prefix her of the language. 39 This is hardly a conclusive argument, however, for it
-. bar- has exactly the shape that Malay her- would take if borrowed could be asserted to the contrary and in accordance with my earlier
straight into Temiar at the present time. The variation in the vowel is a remarks that the "psychosocially-divided subject" meaning could have
wholly-determined consequence of Temiar morphophonemics. In Temiar, developed later, as a means of neutralising the widening distinctions of
her- serves as the causative inflection in certain verbs: caa9 eat, bercaa9 meaning that had by then begun to characterise her-.
feed; tuuk be afraid, bertuuk frighten.37 The proclitic bar- forms the Obviously, no further discussion of the question can be pursued until
imperfective aspect of morphologically invariable verbs that do not follow more concrete evidence is brought to bear, and for that we would have
the normal, inflecting, pattern halab go downriver [perfective], bar to turn to the findings of comparative Austronesian studies. Although
halab ditto [imperfective]. With noun-stems, bar- forms stative verbals there is no room to demonstrate the point here, it would seem that in
of inalienable possession leh wife, bar-kb be married [male]. Thus, fact neither of the above hypotheses is correct, largely because they ignore
Temiar too displays the same contrast between valency-marking, partic the possibility that the development of the Malay affixes has from the
ipant-referring meanings her- and Aktionsart-like, event-referring mean start say, two thousand years ago been bound up in a High/Low
ings bar- that appears to characterise the ostensibly single Malay affix diglossia that had effects on the language that were just as profound in
her- from which they both derive. the proto-historic period as they were later to be.4
Now, Temiar her- corresponds to the historically later form of the
Malay prefix, her-, while Temiar bar- corresponds exactly to the au Notes
thenticated earlier Malay form, bar-. 38 This suggests that the specifically 1. Claims by transformational-generative syntacticians that the phenomena unearthed by
Aktionsart meanings of modern-Malay her- i. e., those that correspond Government-and-Binding studies represent peculiarly and irreducibly linguistic char
semantically to Temiar bar- came to influence Temiar at an earlier date acteristics do not, I think, negative this claim, for so far as I know the Government-
than the specifically valency-related meanings. Such Aktionsart meanings and-Binding framework has not been applied to the study of any other relevant, but
as stative, habitual, aimless have relevance primarily - "naturally", non-linguistic, phenomena - such as the structure of manual action-schemata.
2. This is not to deny that there are other meanings which are secondary to language,
one might say - to the event-salient kind of discourse typical of insider-
called into our minds as a consequence of having to map what we want to say onto
orientated peasant-Malay speech that the Temiars would have had most the relatively unyielding structure of the particular languages we are constrained to
contact with. Valency-related meanings, such as "middle voice" and employ.
"reflexive" belong more naturally, on the other hand, to participant- 3. This approach to personal knowledge derives from the work of the philosopher Michael
Polanyi 1959, 1964.
salient discourse of the sort typical of outsider-orientated classical Malay
4. Anyone who keeps even a cat or dog should need little persuading on this point. For
and the modern standardised varieties. a biologically well-informed discussion of animal subjectivity, see Humphrey 1984.
At first glance, it makes intuitive sense to suppose - as the Temiar 5. If I understand her correctly, this is what the linguist Anna Wierzbicka has been
evidence appears to suggest - that the Aktionsart-like meanings of her- arguing, on a rather different basis, for many years; see especially Wierzbicka 1980.
must have developed earlier than the participant-referring meanings. But 6. These psychoattachment systems are genetically programmed, although their pheno
this supposition would seem to be at odds with the fact that the basic typic expression is mediated by environmental and hormonal factors Reynolds 1976.
7. That certain component features of language - most notably, phonological ones -
"psychosocially-divided subject" meaning is semantically quite neutral might indeed possess biological correlates is no reason to deny that languages might
with respect to the more differentiated meanings. One would normally still be in essence institutions. Institutions can easily serve as the selective matrix of
assume, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that the more basic, further genetic change, especially when they have existed for a long time. Moreover,
semantically neutral, meaning of a linguistic element is older than any as suggested earlier, the mapping of syntactic and semantic structures onto manipulative
action-schemata can produce the illusion that language syntax? is founded on certain,
specific subclasses of meaning that it appears to subsume. In the present
specifically language-related, biological universals cf. Chomsky when that need not
instance, this would suggest that "psychosocially-divided subject" was be the case at all.
the meaning expressed by mar- the ancestral form of her- at the time 8. I am not presenting this as an either/or choice between biology and history, for it is
when that prefix was achieving some kind of identity as a formal element clear that in this field as in several others social organisation, most notably the
biological and the institutional bear a thoroughly dialectical relation, such that one is 21. It is likely that this move towards using -kan as a direct-object marker is a response
always the precondition for the expression of the other. to the parallel tendency in formal Malay, discussed later, for the prefix me- to be
9. Levi-Strauss somewhere remarks that in tribal communities speech is treated as a scarce restricted to a specifically "active-voice" sense.
commodity, not to be wasted. 22. It is this optionality in the use of the Malay verbal affixes that makes rom suspicious
10. If so, my suggestion a few paragraphs back that the articulated character of language of attempts to treat them simply as grammatical-function markers, rather than as
forces us into an existential Angst might need some modification. Perhaps it is the later elements consciously controlled by Malay-speakers for the nuances of meaning - here,
stages of language evolution that pushed in such a direction; or maybe it is the transitivity - that they add to an utterance.
institutional embedding, characteristic of all languages, that brings about such a result. 23. See also Hendon 1966: 62-63 for discussion of the same problem in the local Malay
11. The syntax-centred approach to linguistics is reminiscent of the justification that used dialect of Ulu Muar.
to be presented for the British social anthropologists devotion to the study of kinship: 24. Curiously, this "spontaneous" meaning appears to underlie one of the most frequent
kinship can be neatly formalised i. e., mystified, and it is the one topic that social uses of ter- in modern Malay - to disclaim responsibility for the outcome of ones
anthropology does not share with sociology! The formal study of kinship thereby actions. On Malaysian television, for example, compres frequently sign off by hoping
became the key possession of social anthropology as an autonomous "discipline". that their viewers telah terhibur [PAST ter-entertain] found themselves entertained in
12. Such iconicity may be phonetic or grammatical, a priori or a posteriori. Writers have watching the programme rather than telah dihibur [PAST di-entertain] have been
been discovering phonetically iconic elements in Malay for over a century, but none entertained by the performers actions. This sounds like modesty, but I suspect that
so comprehensively as McCune 1985. the wish to deflect the possibly dangerous effects of bad feeling is involved too.
13. The fourth mode is represented by Zens insistence that both Self and Other are 25. Certain affixal forms are fixed by idiomatic usage, however, and a few words have
illusions. crystalised so that they hardly ever occur without their affixes.
14. A structured regime thus bears much the same relation to an unstructured "culture" 26. The "transitive-passive" prefix di- belongs here too, but there is no room in this paper
as a controlled polity does to an uncontrolled social network or "society". to explore the wide range of meanings it possesses in the different varieties of Malay.
15. In dialectical regimes, there is usually much less linguistic and cultural tendentiousness, 27. The formative -N- in all these examples is usually treated simply as the final part of a
but the consequence of this is a much greater degree of grammatical and cultural single prefix, meN-. Although this analysis works quite well for formal written Malay,
complicatedness, for the elements are all deeply embedded in each other and difficult it fits neither the facts of spoken local Malay nor the comparative Austronesian
to separate out for analytical purposes. evidence. These argue for the interpretation of -N- as an autonomous element, occurring
16. This view of the relation of nation-state and language is presented at greater length in with or without me- and serving to attach an "indicative" or "determinate" notional
Benjamin 1988. meaning to the verb. There is no room to pursue this issue here; it is discussed at
17. The fact that most non-Malay Malaysians now speak the language too is sure to have length in Benjamin in preparation, a.
a profound effect on its future development, but this problem has yet to be studied, 28. Based on his reading of an earlier draft of this paper, Thomas Hunter has applied the
so far as I know, from a linguistic angle. distinctions suggested here - "insider" versus "outsider" and "participant" versus
18. Two highly recommendable essays on the external history of the Malaysian and "event" orientation - to his very much more detailed analysis of variation in Balinese
Indonesian national languages are Nik Safiah Karim 1987 for Malaysian and Hunter 1988.
Hoffman 1979 for Indonesian. An excellent recent study of the internal history of 29. These "rules" of formal Malay are stated with specific regard to this same verb, tanam
early Malay is provided by Adelaar 1985. It must be remarked, however, that this is plant, by at least three authors MacDonald 1976: 49; Abdullah Hassan 1974: 109;
a very under-studied field, enlivened a little by a recent conference on the topic, to Dodds 1977: 72.
which most of the leading international authorities contributed see Mohd Thani and 30. "In both cases the subject aku is agent, but in the first case the subject-predicate
Zaini 1988, published almost entirely in English, despite its Malay title. relation is not marked and results from the position of the elements ku and buat; in
19. In the early years of this century, Wilkinson 1927 [1959]: 13 noted this transitive the second case, on the contrary, the relation is marked but the position of the elements,
usage of -kan as a feature of Brunei Malay, thereby implying that it was not usual in is, for all that, not modifiable. From a strictly functional point of view, we shall regard
the Peninsula. But, if so, the usage has spread, and is nowadays by no means restricted the moneme me- as being here a redundancy possessing, as one might expect, an
to written Malay if indeed it ever was. It has become quite common in the kind of expressive effect."
Malay spoken in "semi-outsider" contexts, such as when a native of Kelantan talks to 31. ".. .ber- introduces a peculiar relation in opposition to me- or to the naked root
a native of Negeri Sembilan, or when a Malay woman presents cooking lessons on employed as a predicate... With buat do, construct we will have an independent
television for Malay women viewers. This use of the suffix -kan has even invaded the utterance:
newly developed radio-broadcasting variety of Temiar, a non-Austronesian language
of Peninsular Malaysia that has never previously possessed suffixes of any kind. tukang buat rumah itu
20. "In several cases the form in me-... -kan is available in parallel to the form in me-..., workman build house that
without it being possible to discern any clear difference." The workman is building that house,
buat being a naked-lexeme predicate. One could also have: References
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Benjamin, "Grammar and Polity, The Background To Standard Malay"

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Trends in Linguistics The Role of Theory

Studies and Monographs 69 in Language Description

Mouton de Gruyter Mouton de Gruyter

Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

The role of theory in language description / edited by William

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The role of theory in language description / ed. by William

Copyright 1993 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-1000 Berlin 30

These words were written not by a supercilious pedant accusing the

1.1 Towards a non-unitary and non-autonomous view of language

A study of this kind must be predicated on a very "leaky" approach to

3.1 Verbal suffixes

PREDICATE becomes in the colloquial:

causative per- 2 aku tanam sayur di kebun

3 Benefactive: I bought him a book. as opposed to:

my "orientation-marker" additionally to its other derivational functions

taking or giving: Sanskrit dti he gives: adte he receives; Greek mist8oun

probably means undergoing blow upon blow or being punched by the

But in addition to these Aktionsart-like meanings this dialect also exhibits

Comrie, Bernard Levinson, Stephen

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