THE ACQUISITION OF MALAY SYNTAX

Abstract

My study arose out of an interest in studying first language acquisition. In a multi-racial, and thus multi-lingual, society like Singapore, the acquisition of a mother tongue is a subject that needs a lot of attention. In such societies, young children often speak up to four languages, speaking each language fluently. Malay was chosen as the language of study as no research has yet been conducted in Singapore on the acquisition of Malay. In order to study acquisition, the spontaneous speech of five Singaporean-Malay children, between the ages of two years to five years was recorded over a space of six weeks. The data was then analysed to obtain a general descriptive pattern of acquisition for Malay. The research revealed that Malay pre-schoolers encounter and use at least two varieties of Malay in their daily lives. The first, namely conversational Malay is the variety that the children hear spoken by adult care-givers. This I call M1. The second is formal spoken Malay, a variety closer to written Malay, which the children hear on radio and television. This form is similar to the written form found in story books that parents read to children. This is M2. It was found that there are specific grammatical features that separate the two varieties and an attempt has been made to describe these features. As not all aspects of language acquisition can be described within the word limit of this thesis, only some areas were covered and the description limited to simple structures. The areas described were those of: word order, affixation, particles and word formation and interrogatives. It was found that children did have an ordered and systematic pattern of acquisition. The variety of sentence structures developed from one-word to two word utterances to longer VN structures and finally to NN, NA, NV and NN structures. These reveal the wide spectrum of informal verbal sentences in M1 reaching a point at which they are similar to the formal spoken and written sentences of M2. The use of affixation in the study was found to be rather low. Of these, there was a distinctive preference for the suffix kan, which is a transitivising agent. It was observed that there was a progress in the development of variety of affixes according to age. The research results for affixation are by and large similar to Long's (1993) study which was conducted in Malaysia. Reduplication of words for intensifying a state or an action was more common than that for pluralization. Interrogatives also displayed a certain progression in development. The frequency of use of the Yes/No interrogative and the wh-word show an order of acquisition similar to that recorded in studies of English such as those of Klima and Bellugi (1973) and Limber (1973). Although this is a small study and as such has limitations it can be said that a useful description of the acquisition of Malay structures has been obtained. This can be complemented in the future by more research into the specific aspects in the acquisition of the Malay language.