Selecting for and Selecting Despite: A Javanese case study

Abstract

This is an investigation of the argument structure of Javanese (Austronesian, Indonesia) which focuses on the distribution of four core derivational morphemes: the Actor Voice prefix, and the suffixes -ake, -i, and -an. The project is based on original consultant work conducted with a speaker of the Central dialect of Javanese. The work establishes language internal diagnostics for various aspects of a stem's lexical semantics and lexical category and then utilizes these criteria to analyze a wide variety of morphological derivatives, both verbal and nominal. The resulting analysis is able to predict the distribution of derivational morphemes and the nature of their resulting derivatives to a higher degree than what was previously understood to be possible.