Apposition in Malay

Abstract

Apposition in Malay addresses the lack of a detailed exploration and description of the construction in the language.The book provides a lengthy detail of Malay apposition, by providing, in the first chapter, a case for its necessity.Moving away from the prescriptive tradition, the description is based on constructions derived from three text types: journalistic texts, academic texts and fictional texts.Chosen for their different functions, appeal and communicative potential, the book details the findings based on the analysis of apposition in the 450,000 word corpora used as database.The uses of apposition are accounted for from a varied perspective. The linguistic characteristics of apposition are detailed based on their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic manifestations.These then provided a basis for six conditions that have to be satisfied for a construction to be regarded as apposition in Malay.The conditions also take into consideration borderline cases between appositive constructions and other similar-looking ones, therefore allowing for a distinction to be made between a full apposition and a partial one.The conditions explicitly recognize that apposition is not a clear-cut relation. However, it is this phenomenon that makes apposition unique and therefore, well-deserving of its own place in the description of Malay grammar.