Reflexive Pronoun or Conjunctive Operator: Forms Containing diri in the Riau and Irian Dialects of Indonesian

David Gil

In the Riau and Irian dialects of Indonesian, translations of English reflexive constructions typically contain, in place of the English himself / herself etc., a form based on the stem diri, most commonly sendiri, as in (1) and (2), less often other forms, including diri, diri sendiri and sendiri-sendiri. Facts such as these provide prima facie reason to suppose that such forms, like their English counterparts, are reflexive pronouns &emdash; as, in fact, is generally assumed to be the case with respect to the corresponding forms in canonical varieties of Malay and Indonesian (eg. Huang 1996, Cole and Hermon 1996).

However, in Riau and Irian Indonesian, forms containing diri exhibit two sets of properties which call into question their characterization as reflexive pronouns. First, whereas true reflexive pronouns are typically c-commanded by their antecendents, forms based on diri appear to obey a different set of structural constraints, and may, in fact, in some cases, asymmetrically c-command their putative antecedents, as in (3) - (5). Secondly, forms derived from diri occur not only in reflexive constructions but, in addition, in a variety of other constructions which do not seem to be amenable to any kind of analysis as reflexives: in such cases, these forms appear to be associated with a wide range of functions, forming reciprocals (6), expressing contrast (7), marking the absence of an agent (8), and conveying meanings such as "only" (9) and "alone" (10). On the basis of these facts, it is argued that forms based on diri do not constitute true reflexives, and that the Riau and Irian dialects of Indonesian are in fact completely lacking in bona fide reflexive constructions.

Instead, it is argued that forms containing diri in Riau and Irian Indonesian may be more insightfully characterized as conjunctive (aka focus) operators, following the definition in Gil (1994a,1995). Thus, forms based on diri form a natural class with other such operators in Indonesian, including pun, juga, lagi, (s)aja, baru and cuman, as well as their counterparts in other languages, eg. English also, too, even, just, only, and so forth. Accordingly, a formal semantic analysis is proposed for forms derived from diri, providing a unified semantic representation for the entire range of meanings of such forms, reflexive and otherwise, as exemplified in (1) - (10); The outlines of this analysis are presented in (11), and two sample representations are provided in (12) and (13).

Consider the representation in (12), for sentence (1) Saya tembak sendiri "I shot myself". In Riau Indonesian, Saya tembak can be understood as either "I shot (someone)" or "(Someone) shot me"; as argued elsewhere (Gil 1994b), this is not an ambiguity, but, rather, a vagueness&emdash;a more perspicuous single English gloss encompassing both possibilities might be "There was a shooting activity with which I was associated". This is what the right-hand target conjunct in (12) says. What the left-hand source conjunct says is that nobody else was associated with the same shooting activity. Thus, given that shootings prototypically involve both an agent and a patient, one plausible interpretation of Saya tembak sendiri, that which in fact was intended when the sentence was uttered, is that the speaker was associated with the shooting activity in both capacities, as agent and as patient. Thus, it obtains an interpretation corresponding to the English reflexive construction "I shot myself". However, the Riau Indonesian sentence itself, Saya tembak sendiri, is not a reflexive construction: saya is not assigned a thematic role of agent, sendiri is not assigned a thematic role of patient, and sendiri is not bound by Saya in the way a reflexive is bound by its antecedent. Now turn to the representation in (13), for sentence (8) Ini putar sendiri "It's turning around by itself". Although (12) corresponds to an English reflexive construction, and (13) to an English non-reflexive construction, the two representations are completely isomorphic. Thus, in (13), the right-hand target conjunct says that there is a turning activity with which it is associated, while the left-hand source conjunct says that nothing else is associated with the same turning activity. However, unlike shootings, which typically involve two participants, turnings often involve but a single participant, the theme. Accordingly, in the case at hand, the relevant interpretation of Ini putar sendiri is one which asserts that the turning activity does in fact involve only a theme, and not, in addition, an agent or cause. In this way, the sentence arrives at an interpretation corresponding to the English non-reflexive construction "It's turning around by itself". Thus, the unified analysis of sendiri as a conjunctive operator posits similar representations for supposedly "reflexive" and "non-reflexive" interpretations, thereby suggesting that such a distinction is not a viable one in the grammars of the Riau and Irian dialects of Indonesian.

The characterization of forms containing diri as conjunctive operators thus accounts for their properties which would be atypical of reflexive pronouns. Since conjunctive operators tend to c-command their targets, it is not surprising to find forms based on diri c-commanding their would-be antecedents, or targets; as indeed it is not unexpected to find that in these dialects, there are, apparently, no long-distance reflexives. And since the analysis outlined in (11) permits a variety of alternative choices of target, source, source domain and target domain, there is no longer any need to consider as a fortuitous coincidence the fact that forms derived from diri are associated with an apparently wide range of seemingly different interpretations.

In conclusion, it is noted that at least some of the properties of forms containing diri in Riau and Irian Indonesian are matched by similar properties exhibited by other putative reflexive pronouns in other languages. For example, Tang (1989) and others have observed that in Mandarin, too, a possessor inside a genitive NP may appear to license a reflexive pronoun, as in (3) and (4). Similarly, Gil (1987), König (1991) and others have pointed to the existence of a recurring cross-linguistic pattern whereby an identical form appears to serve double function as reflexive marker and conjunctive operator &emdash; a limited instantiation of this is even provided by the English form self. Facts such as these suggest that it might be profitable to take a second look at various presumed reflexive pronouns in other languages, in order to examine the possibility that they, too, might perhaps be more insightfully treated as conjunctive operators.

Data:

(The analyses presented in this paper are based on a corpus of spontaneous speech specimens collected during field-work; in the examples below, the context in which utterance occurred is indicated in square brackets, to facilitate its understanding.)

(1) Saya tembak sendiri Riau

1:sg shoot sendiri

[Playing Nintendo game, with lots of shooting]

"I shot myself"

(2) Saya kubur sendiri Irian

1:sg bury sendiri

[On beach, kids covering each other in sand]

"I'm burying myself"

(3) Sendirii diai tembak Riau

sendiri 3 shoot

[Viewing a picture of a man pointing a gun at his head]

"Himself he's shooting"

(4) Kena hidung[-nya]i sendirii Riau

undergo nose-3:assoc sendiri

[Viewing a picture of a man pointing a gun at his head]

"His nose was gotten by himself", ie. "He got his own nose"

(5) Terbakar sendirii diai punya mulut Irian

invol-burn sendiri 3 poss mouth

[Person absent-mindedly moves to takes puff on wrong end of cigarette, burns cheek; somebody comments ...]

"His mouth was burnt by himself", ie. "He burnt his own mouth"

(6) Nembak mati sendiri reciprocal Riau

ag-shoot die sendiri

[Viewing a picture of two men pointing guns at each other]

"They're shooting each other dead"

(7) Bapak sendiri tarok di sana contrast Irian

father sendiri put loc there

[Speaker almost knocks my laptop computer off table, speaker's friend berates him for his carelessness, speaker then defends himself, saying ...]

"He put it there himself"

(8) Ini putar sendiri agentless Riau

dem.prox revolve sendiri

[About a cassette player apparently revolving on its own]

"It's going around by itself"

(9) Aku sendiri tak ada rumah "only" Riau

1:sg sendiri neg exist house

[Speaker complaining about his situation; after saying this, he points to each of his friends in turn and says that he does have a house]

"Only I don't have a house"

(10) Kami tidur Siang Malam sendiri "alone" Riau

1:excl sleep [name of restaurant] sendiri

[Street boy complaining he had to sleep alone the previous night, and not with other gang members, as usual]

"I slept alone at the Siang Malam restaurant"

(11) A Unified Semantic Analysis for Forms Containing diri

For any occurrence of a form containing diri:

(a) An expression in morphosyntactic relation with the form containing diri is indexed as target.

(b) A freely inferred element I semantically parallel to the target is indexed as source.

(c) An expression surrounding the target is indexed as source domain (s/dom).

(In particular cases, this expression may consist entirely of the target.)

(d) An expression surrounding the source domain is indexed as target domain (t/dom). (In particular cases, this expression may consist entirely of the source domain.)

(e) The following interpretation is assigned:

source conjunct conjunction target conjunct

~ [ ... [ I ]source ... ]s/dom AND [ ... [ ... [ ... ]target ... ]s/dom ... ]t/dom

(12) ~ [ [ I ]source tembak ]s/dom AND [ [ [ saya ]target tembak ]s/dom ]t/dom [ example (1) ]

(13) ~ [ [ I ]source putar ]s/dom AND [ [ [ ini ]target putar ]s/dom ]t/dom [ example (8) ]

References:

Cole, Peter and Gabriella Hermon (1996) "An Apparent Typological Anomaly: Long Distance Reflexives in Singapore Malay", Ms., University of Delaware, Newark.

Gil, David (1987) "Gil Replies to Salkie", in S. Modgil and C. Modgil eds., Noam Chomsky, Consensus and Controversy, Falmer International Master-Minds Challenged: 3, Falmer Press, Barcombe, 143-145.

Gil, David (1994a) "Conjunctive Operators: A Unified Semantic Analysis", in P. Bosch and R. van der Sandt eds., Focus and Natural Language Processing, Volume 2, Semantics, Proceedings of a Conference in Celebration of the 10th Anniversary of the Journal of Semantics, 12th-15th June, 1994, Hotel Schloß Wolfsbrunnen, Meinhard-Schwebda, Germany, Working Papers of the Institute for Logic and Linguistics, Working Paper 7, ISSN 0946-7521, IBM TR-80.94-007, 311-322.

Gil, David (1994b) "The Structure of Riau Indonesian", Nordic Journal of Linguistics 17:179-200.

Gil, David (1995) "Conjunctive Operators: A Cross-Linguistic Study", IATL&emdash;Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference of The Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics, 72-90.

Huang, Yan (1996) "A Note on the Head-Movement Analysis of Long-Distance Reflexives", Linguistics 34:833-840.

König, Ekkehard (1991) The Meaning of Focus Particles, A Comparative Perspective, Routledge, London and New York.

Tang, C.T. Jane (1989) "Chinese Reflexives", Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 7:93-121.