Passivization in street linguistics;)

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Passivization in street linguistics

If there's anything I understood in Syntax 1 last fall, it's passivization. Here's what happens:-

"Passivization is a syntactic process in which the passive morpheme suppresses the external argument and strips off from the verb the ability to license accusative case to its complement. The surface subject is generated as a complement of the verb but moves to the specifier of IP to get nominative case."
-taken from Satoshi Tomioka's lecture notes for Ling609, Fall 2007.

Before you dismiss this as another jargon-laden linguistics entry, let me first try to explain to you what's really happening and illustrate with some examples. Take a normal sentence, for example:-

1) Tempe kicks Jendol.

In the sentence above, the verb "kicks" assigns accusative case to the object NP (Noun Phrase) "Jendol". The subject NP "Tempe" gets nominative case. Let's see what happens when passivization occurs:-

1') Jendol is kicked (by Tempe).

In sentence 1', we can see that the verb has already taken the passive morpheme (underlyingly "-en", "-ed" on the surface), and its ability to assign accusative case has been blown away by the winds of passivization. This motivates the NP "Jendol" to move up to the front to get nominative case. The original subject NP "Tempe" is now in a "by-phrase" and its realization in the surface has become optional.

Lately I have been feeling like a verb undergoing passivization, as though my ability to assign categories to things around me has been stripped off. And like the verb above, the original subject of my existence has become optional and not obligatory. And the object has moved to the front, because of my inability to offer any justification for its existence in its original position (post-verbal). Consequently, I have now become lazy and accepting to anything that comes my way and thus, I am marked with a sign of passivity (not unlike how the passive morpheme marks the verb).

...Ok, maybe the metaphor above is too abstract. Please forget the last paragraph.

Let's get to the real deal now. There is another type of passive sentences in English:-

2) Jendol got kicked (by Tempe)

The passive sentences are known as 1) be-passive and 2) get-passive respectively. They are both used in everyday speech.
In Malay, the standard passive form of is the di-passive, which is exemplified below.

3) Tempe tendang Jendol
Tempe kick Jendol <--- word-by-word translation, also known as glossing
Tempe kicks Jendol.

3') Jendol ditendang (oleh Tempe).
Jendol di-kick by Tempe
Jendol is kicked by Tempe.

Sentence 3 corresponds almost directly to sentence 1' (with the exception of the 'be' verb, of course, as there is no 'be' verb in Malay). One can argue that "di-" is the passive morpheme as it attaches itself to the verb in the passive sentence. However, this is hardly ever used in KL Malay, in which the latter form, I would like to argue, is more ubiquitous (but is frequently unnoticed):-

4') Jendol kena tendang (dengan Tempe).
Jendol affective kick by Tempe
Jendol got kicked by Tempe.

In the passive sentence above, instead of "di-", we see the affective marker "kena" surfacing, indicating that the NP "Jendol" is affected by the action. Comparatively, this looks much more like the get-passive in English.

Interestingly, in Manglish, we sometimes hear the sentence below (I know I used it during my primary school years in La Salle PJ):-

5) He sure kena caught one
He will surely get caught.

Example 5) seems to testify that KL Malay speakers favor the kena-passive more, even to the extent of importing it to English.

I hope more Malay linguists would notice this little thing happening in KL Malay, and do some research on real everyday speech, instead of how Malay speakers are supposed to or thought to speak. In other words, we need more street linguists (with attitude).

Source: http://theelsewherecondition.blogspot.com/2008/02/passivization-in-street-linguistics.html