Thesis (M.A. (Linguistics))--Mahidol University, 1984.

Academisch proefschrift - Utrecht.

This thesis is a description of some common linguistic features of Colloquial Malay, a spoken variety of the Malay language used by native Malay speakers of Malaysia among themselves in everyday unmarked speech situations. While linguistic works and grammars of Standard Malay (or, Bahasa Malaysia), the national language of Malaysia are numerous, there are very few works on the less formal varieties and dialects of Malay spoken in Malaysia. Little importance is given to studying Colloquial Malay and scholarly works on Colloquial Malay are very rare. This thesis seeks to explore and compare various formal properties of Colloquial Malay and Standard Malay and in doing so, to contribute to this largely unexplored area of study in the Malay language. / In this work I aim to provide a description of some of the major characteristics of CM in contrast with SM based on a comparison of one sizeable CM text with a comparable SM narrative text. An inductive method is used in analysing inter-and intra-textual shifts in register, that is, shifts in the degree of formality or informality, which correlate with the use of CM-like properties and SM-like properties. From this I build up a description of a set of CM features which can be expected to be characteristic of actual colloquial Malay usage, which will provide a basis for further study. The types of CM features described are diverse and include lexical, morphological and syntactic properties. / The lexical features examined include variant phonological forms, colloquial lexical roots, semantic shifts in the colloquial usage of some common roots, code-switching and English loans, the class of emotive, modal and illocutionary particles, and the classes of pronouns and prepositions in Colloquial Malay. Some typical Colloquial Malay expressions, phrases and constructions are dealt with briefly. Several grammatical features are considered: affixation and its frequency in Colloquial Malay relative to Standard Malay; ‘passive’ and causative constructions; the structure of the noun phrase; the Modifier-punya-Head construction, a typical Colloquial Malay construction; verbal auxiliaries; and typical uses of the adverbial saja/(a)je ‘only, just’ in Colloquial Malay. Clause combining strategies, which include subordination, coordination, verb serialization and juxtaposition, are discussed as well.

En parcourant l’histoire des deux langues malaise et sanscrite, nous avons non seulement mis encore plusen lumière que le malais puise dans la langue sanscrite mais également remarqué que les mots sanscritsempruntés ont subi des modifications au niveau phonologique. Par ailleurs, le préfixe sanscrit est toujoursutilisé pour créer de nouveaux mots. Nous avons proposé que le malais soit alors rattaché à la branche« Indo-malaisienne ». Nous mettons en évidence dans ce travail des structures phrastiques canoniquesd’une part du malais et d’autre part nous comparons les systèmes verbaux du français et du malais. Le malais présente un degré d’agglutination élevé alors que pour le français le phénomène est très rare. Nous voyons par exemple aussi qu’en français le complément indirect est introduit par une préposition alors que le malais omet la préposition, que le verbe « ada » en malais exprime certains sens des verbes « être et avoir », que les structures de transitivité du verbe et les structures aspectuelles ne sont pas identiques dans les deux langues, etc. Nous avons mis en place un formalisme qui permet de comparer les deux systèmes en nous inspirant des microsystèmes établis par S. Cardey et pour créer d’autres microsystèmes verbaux. Nous voyons ainsi mieux les convergences et divergences au niveau des structures et des systèmes verbaux du français et du malais. / Having closely examined the history of Malay and Sanskrit, we have not only shed new light on Malay’sdrawing on Sanskrit but we have also observed that words borrowed from Sanskrit have beenphonologically modified. Furthermore Malay still uses Sanskrit prefixes to generate new words. Wepropose that Malay be attached to the ‘Indo-Malaysian’ language branch. We have analyzed canonicalsentence structures and have also compared the verbal system of French and Malay. Malay is a highlyagglutinative language whilst for French verbs this phenomenon is very rare. We have observed forexample that the indirect object is introduced by a preposition in French whilst prepositions are absent inMalay; that the Malay verb “ada” can represent certain meanings of ‘be and have’ in French (être andavoir); that transitive and aspectual structures are not the same in the two languages, etc. We havedeveloped a formal representation which enables comparing the French and Malay languages systems, thisbeing inspired by S. Cardey’s micro-systemic approach which has also enabled creating other verbal microsystems.In doing so, we have clarified the similarities and differences concerning French and Malaystructures and verbal systems.

An overview of the historical background of error analysis and interference issues, followed by a sample error analysis in a case study context. This investigation of errors is significant in bringing to light the impact on English student writing of the differnces between English versus the indirect nature of various levels of Indonesian.