Typological Change Across Registers – the Case of Malaysian

Abstract

The analyses of Malaysian Malay focus on the language’s verbal morphology as the main means of rendering grammatical meaning, applying to it a somewhat outdated label of ‘agglutinative language’. Although the language situation in Malaysia can be described as diglossia or, more accurately, polyglossia, most of the current studies of Malay syntax are concerned with its standard variety. The present paper is an attempt at the analysis of common syntactic devices used in Colloquial Malay in three frequent types of constructions – reciprocal, passive and causative. While Standard Malay makes use of affixation to render grammatical meaning, Colloquial Malay displays the opposite tendency by reducing the affixation to a minimum and giving more prominence to constructions with auxiliary words. It is shown that while all three constructions in the Standard variety are coded by means of affixes attached onto a verb in the Colloquial register, they are represented by a number of periphrastic constructions. The increase of analytic means in Colloquial Malay is in line with the development of other Mainland Southeast-Asian languages.