Alignments of Coreferential Grammatical Functions in Indonesian

Abstract

This paper examined the syntactic behaviour of the S, A, and O grammatical functions in clause combination in Indonesian. Are the S and A grammatical functions are treated in the same way, and the O gramatical function is treated differently in syntactically linked clauses? Can the type of Indonesian be determined based on the syctactic behaviour of the coreferential grammatical functions? There are a number of syntactic constructions that can be used to show  the syntactic behaviour of grammatical functions, but in this study, the specific discussion is on the possibility of combining clauses that may have one or more than one coreferential grammatical function. The result of the analysis of the coreferential grammatical alignments showed that Indonesian behaves like an accusative language type. However, in terms of markedness, the voice systems of Indonesian are different from those in an accusative language. In an accusative language, the active voice is the unmarked voice, while the passive voice is marked voice. For Indonesian voice system, the active and one type of passives are equally marked. The other passive form showed that the verb  occurs in its basic form, and the agent cannot be deleted.  Thus the notions of active and passive in Indonesian are not like those  in an accusative language. This strongly suggests that Indonesian is not a typical accusative language.