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A corpus-based analysis of Malay prefix ber-

 | National Chengchi University
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Abstract
The Malay ber- prefix has not been discussed as extensively as other Malay verb prefixes. It has been accorded fuzzy meanings, such as “to mean something taking place” and “to be able to combine with any base form.” Such vague definitions have hindered and prevented a thorough understanding of it. Our analysis took into consideration a middle voice marking system of situation types established by Kemmer (Kemmer, Suzanne. 1993. The Middle Voice. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 1994. Middle voice, transitivity and the elaboration of events. Voice: Form and Function, ed. by Barbara Fox and Paul J. Hopper, 179–230. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and refined the categories based on instances collected from a large annotated corpus, the Malaysian Malay News Corpus (Chung, Siaw-Fong, and Meng-Hsien Shih. 2019. An annotated news corpus of Malaysian Malay. NUSA Linguistic Studies of Languages in and around Indonesia 671:7–34.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). From the corpus, 262,210 instances of ber- were retrived, analyzed and categorized into 14 distinct functions. The results revealed that 93.33% of the total word-tokens of ber- were middle markers, whereas the remaining 6.67% were non-middle markers. We also refined and added new categories not mentioned in the past (e.g., “State of Having root,” and “Stative”). Some of the middle functions of ber-, especially the most cited and prototypical “Grooming/Body Care” function, were not the most frequently found functions. This indicated that ber- in Malay, as a middle marker in the form of reflexives in Malay, was not frequently found in the corpus.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Ber- as a middle marker
      • 2.1.1ber1 grooming/body care
      • 2.1.2ber2 change in body posture
      • 2.1.3ber3 reciprocal event
      • 2.1.4ber4 translational motion
      • 2.1.5ber5 cognition middle
      • 2.1.6ber6 spontaneous event
      • 2.1.7ber7 non-translational motion
      • 2.1.8ber8 indirect middle/self-benefactive middle
      • 2.1.9ber9 speech action
      • 2.1.10ber10 state of having root
      • 2.1.11ber11a emotion middle and ber11b stative
      • 2.1.12ber12 instrument
    • 2.2Non-middle use of ber-
      • 2.2.1ber13 classification
      • 2.2.2ber14 grammatical word
  • 3.Results
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
References (24)
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