Double Double, Morphology and Trouble: Looking into Reduplication in Indonesian

Double Double, Morphology and Trouble: Looking into Reduplication in Indonesian Meladel Mistica, Avery Andrews, I Wayan Arka The Australian National University {meladel.mistica,avery.andrews, wayan.arka}@anu.edu.au Timothy Baldwin The University of Melbourne tb@ldwin.net Abstract This paper investigates reduplication in In- donesian. In particular, we focus on verb redu- plication that has the agentive voice affix meN, exhibiting a homorganic nasal. We outline the recent changes we have made to the imple- mentation of our Indonesian grammar, and the motivation for such changes. There are two main issues that we deal with in our implementation: how we account for the morphophonemic facts relating to sound changes in the morpheme; and how we con- struct word formation (i.e. sublexical) rules in creating these derived words exhibiting redu- plication. 1 Introduction This study looks at full reduplication in Indone- sian verbs, which is a morphological operation that involves the doubling of a lexical stem. In this paper, we step through the word formation pro- cess of reduplication involving agentive voice mark- ing, including the morphophonemic changes and the morphosyntactic changes brought about by this construction. The reduplication investigated here is a productive morphological process; it is read- ily applied to many lexical stems in creating new words. Instead of having extra entries in the lexi- con for reduplicated words, we aim to investigate the changes brought about by reduplication and encode them in a meaningful way to interpret, during pars- ing, these morphosyntactically complex, valance- changing, derived words. This investigation sits within a larger Indonesian resource project that primarily aims to build an elec- tronic grammar for Indonesian within the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). Our project forms part of a group of researchers, PARGRAM1 whose aim is to also produce wide-coverage gram- mars built on a collaboratively agreed upon set of grammatical features (Butt et al., 1999). In order to ensure comparability we use the same linguistic tools for implementation.2 One of the issues we address is how to adequately account for morphophonemic facts, as schematised in Examples (1), (2) and (3): (1) [meN+tarik]∧2 ↔ meN+tarik+hyphen+meN+tarik ↔ menarik-menarik “pulling (iteratively)” (2) meN+[tarik]∧2 ↔ meN+tarik+hyphen+tarik ↔ menarik-narik (*menarik-tarik) “pulling quickly” (3) meN+[tarik]∧2 ↔ tarik+meN+hyphen+tarik ↔ tarik-menarik (*narik-menarik) “pull at each other” Here, tarik “pull” is the verb stem, meN is a verbal affix with a homorganic nasal (the function of which will be discussed in Section 2.1), ∧2 is the notation we use for reduplication, and the square brackets [ ] are used to specify the scope of the reduplication. 1http://www2.parc.com/isl/groups/nltt/ pargram/ 2http://www2.parc.com/isl/groups/nltt/ xle/ and http://www.stanford.edu/˜laurik/ fsmbook/home.html Each of the examples consists of three lines: (a) a simplified representation of which words are redu- plicated, (b) a breakdown of the components that make up the surface word, and (c) the surface word (in italics). Note that the first-line representation for (2) and (3) is identical, but the surface words differ on the basis of the order in which the reduplication and meN affixation are applied. Note also that, as is apparent in the gloss, (3) …

Content truncated to 500 words