Abstract
This paper presents phonological systems of Malay grammar. Focusing on prefixation, which includes single and multiple prefixation in Malay, this study claims that the grammar of Malay is not completely uniform. The occurrence of nasal and voiceless obstruent clusters is not always resolved by nasal substitution, as claimed by previous Malay scholars regarding the clusters. Based on evidence from one million words obtained from the DBP-UKM corpus database, I further claim that Malay has co-existent grammars, one of which allows nasal and voiceless obstruent clusters, while another does not. This paper proposes that the co-existent grammars in Malay can satisfactorily be explained by adopting a constraint-based analysis named Optimality theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993).
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Jaafar, S.R.S. (2013). Is Malay Grammar Uniform? A Constraint-Based Analysis. In: Morrill, G., Nederhof, MJ. (eds) Formal Grammar. FG FG 2013 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8036. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39998-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39998-5_7
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