The Study of meaning and function’s expansion of ‘Jom’ on the basis of multi-corpus

Abstract

This study intends to investigate meaning and function’s expansion of ‘jom’ which is a adverb of degree which represent speaker’s attitude about events. Basically its basic meaning is ‘a little’, but it has also ‘some degree’ in some data. And also it’s meaning changes across the data, ‘refusal’, ‘boast’, ‘reproach’, ‘discourse marker’, etc. This paper investigate those phenomenons by three tests which are a substitution of ‘jokum’, a possibility of deletion, a meaning change test. Two meaning of ‘jom’ are controlled by a verb which is with ‘jom’ in the same clause. And ‘request’ is derived from a positive of ‘jom’ by honorific system, and it is advanced to ‘boast’ or admiration. While ‘refusal’ is derived from a negative by substitution ‘jokum’. ‘Jom’s a determiner which emphasize a preceding noun, an adverb phrase. It is used a discourse marker which presents the begin, middle, and close part of a discourse.