LEXICAL CHANGES IN BAHASA MELAYU NUSANTARA AT SYNTACTIC LEVEL: A DIACHRONIC STUDY

Abstract

The study of linguistic changes, including semantic changes and syntactic changes are parts of the etymology study. Any changes experienced by a language can occur due to the influence of external factors such as politics, socials, religions, or cultures; as well as the internal factors. The internal factors in question are changes in one or more linguistic aspect(s) that could affect each other. The morphological changes of a word, for example, can make changes in the semantic or syntactic aspects. This paper aims to find out which linguistic aspects of Malay words, especially verbs, which are still used in the Indonesian language to date that change over time, and to explain how the changes in verb’s meaning affect the transitivity of the verbs. The data of this study are obtained from several Malay and Indonesian corpora. Those corpora are then set diachronically (from the 1300s to the 2000s) to analyze the meaning changes of the verbs. By applying the corpus linguistics approach and the transitivity analysis, this study has produced some patterns of semantic changes at the syntactic level, which can contribute to etymological information of Bahasa Melayu Nusantara vocabulary.

Keywords

• semantic change, syntactic change, transitivity, verbs, etymology