ADJECTIVES IN MALAY: A CLOSER ANALYSIS

Abstract

The structure of Standard Malay has been the subject of little interest in linguistic research. As a major language in the Southeast Asian region, the lack of documentation regarding the linguistics of Malay is glaring. This thesis raises awareness of this issue by showing the value of studying the linguistics of Malay. An in-depth analysis of Malay speaker’s preferences regarding the word class of adjectives was performed and the findings related back to broader linguistic theories of Adjective Ordering Restrictions (AOR). AOR is a robust phenomenon that appears across many languages. Debates rage on concerning whether languages have a correct adjective order that is used by speakers and how this order comes about. This thesis takes inspiration from Scontras et al.’s (2017) work on subjectivity being a predictor of adjective order in English and extends it to Malay. Acceptability judgments were collected from Malay speakers to empirically test their perspectives on adjective order and how syntax or subjectivity relates to it. The usage of Relative Clauses for Malay adjectives was also observed to empirically test claims regarding stacked adjectives in Malay made by Español-Echevarría (2016). The findings suggest Malay does have a hierarchy which adjectives adhere to. Through further investigations of the syntactic and semantic frameworks of theories on adjective order, I conclude that adjective ordering in Malay is derived from a semantic basis based on subjectivity of the adjectives and that a syntactic theory from Scott (2002) is ill-equipped to account for most of the practices of Malay speakers with regards to dual-adjective constructions.