Author, Subjects, Keywords

Cited Author

 
 
   » By Author or Editor
 » Browse Author by Alphabet
 » By Journal
 » By Subjects
 » Malaysian Journals
 » By Type
 » By Year
 » By Latest Additions
 
 
   » By Author
 » Top 20 Authors
 » Top 20 Article
 » Top Journal Cited
 » Top Article Cited
 » Journal Citation Statistics
 » Usage Since Sept 2007


 
 
 

Login | Create Account

Wh-Questions in Malay: An Explanation for the Restriction of Extraction to Subject Position with Yang

Wong, B.E., (2008) Wh-Questions in Malay: An Explanation for the Restriction of Extraction to Subject Position with Yang. 3L The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies, Volume 14 . pp. 109-126. ISSN 0128-5157

[img]
Preview
PDF - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader
354Kb

Official URL: http://pkukmweb.ukm.my/~ppbl/3L/Full%20text%20pdf/3LVol14/6-Wong%20Bee%20Eng%206.pdf

Affiliations

Universiti Putra Malaysia

Abstract

In wh-question formation in standard Malay, only extraction from the subject position is possible. This is in contrast to the English language, where extraction is possible from positions lower than the subject position. In fact, in Malay, any argument in a position lower than that of a subject has to be passivised to become a derived subject before extraction can occur. When an extraction occurs, from an embedded clause in question formation, the verb in the matrix clause has to be passivised as well. In this paper, an explanation is offered to account for this phenomenon in standard Malay. The framework adopted to explain the phenomenon is based on the principles and parameters approach (see Chomsky, 1981a, 1981b, 1986a, 1991), and the Minimalist Programme (See Chomsky, 1995). In particular, Rizzi’s theory of relativised minimality and its conjunctive notion of the Empty Category Principle (ECP) (1990) are referred to. Additionally, Shlonsky’s treatment of Palestinian Arabic relativisation (1992) is extended to Malay wh-question formation. The motivation for such an exercise is that this will have implications in terms of contribution to the body of literature in Malay linguistics, particularly from the generative perspective.

Item Type:Journal
Keywords:Malay language, Study and teaching, Questioning, English language, Comparisons
Subjects:P Language and Literature
L Education
ID Code:9467

Cheng, L. L-S. (1997). On the typology of wh-questions. New York: Garland Publishing.

Chomsky, N. (1973). Conditions on transformations. In Anderson, S. & Kiparsky, P. (Eds.), A festschrift for Morris Halle (pp. 232-286). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Chomsky, N. (1995). The minimalist program. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Chung, S. (1976a). An object-creating rule in Bahasa Indonesian. Linguistic Inquiry, 7(1), 41-87.

Chung, S. (1976b). On the subject of two passives in Indonesian. In Li, C. N. (Ed.), Subject and topic. New York: Academic Press.

Cole, P. & Hermon, G. (1995). Is wh-in-situ really in-situ? Evidence from Malay and Chinese. In Aranovich, R., Byrne, W., Preuss, S. & Senturia, M. (Eds.), The proceedings of the thirteenth west coast conference on formal linguistics (pp. 189-204). Stanford: CSLI, Leland Stanford Junior University.

Cole, P., Hermon, G. & Norhaida Bt. Aman (1997). “Apa yang “apa yang”? Paper presented at the First Symposium on Malay and Indonesian Linguistics. 14 – 15 January, Universiti Sains Malaysia.

Comrie, B. (1981). Language universals and linguistic typology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Culicover, P. W. (1997). Principles and parameters: An introduction to syntactic theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

Haegeman, L. & Guéron, J. (1999). English grammar: A generative perspective. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hung, H. J. (1987). Lexical and functional categories in Bahasa Malaysia.Unpublished MA dissertation, University of Toronto.

Keenan, E. L. & Comrie, B. (1977). Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry, 8 (1), 63-99.

Kitahara, H. (1997). Elementary operations and optimal derivations. MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Martohardjono, G. (1993). Wh-movement in the acquisition of a second language: A cross-linguistic study of 3 languages with and without overt movement. Unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Cornell University.

McCloskey, J. (1990). Resumptive pronouns, a’-binding, and levels of representation in Irish. The Syntax and Semantics of Modern Celtic Languages, Syntax and Semantics, 23, 199-248. San Diego: Academic Press.

Nik Safiah Karim, Farid, M. Onn, Hashim Hj. Musa, Abdul Hamid Mahmood (2008). Tatabahasa dewan. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.

Rizzi, L. (1990). Relativised minimality. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Saddy, D. (1991). Wh scope mechanisms in Bahasa Indonesia. In Cheng, L. & Demirdache, H. (Eds.), More papers on wh-movement, MIT working papers in linguistics 15 (pp. 183-218). MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Shlonsky, U. (1992). Resumptive pronouns as a last resort. Linguistic Inquiry, 23(3),443-468.

Sie, I. D. (1988). The syntactic passive in Bahasa Indonesia. Unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Amsterdam.

Voskuil, J. (1996). Comparative morphology: Verb taxonomy in Indonesian, Tagalog and Dutch. The Netherlands: Holland Institute of Generative Linguistics.

Yeoh, C. K. (1979). Interaction of rules in Bahasa Malaysia. Unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Repository Staff Only: item control page
 
 
 
 
 
 
© Copyright 2007 MyAIS Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya – All Rights Reserved. Malaysian Abstracting and Indexing System is powered by EPrints 3 which is developed by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. More information and software credits.