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This chapter explores some ways in which referring to the self and the addressee – or interlocutor reference – by means of pronouns, kin terms or other nouns, accomplishes more than simple referring. Focusing on interlocutor reference in argumentative contexts, the study proposes that referring overtly, i.e., by means of referring forms rather than null expressions, appears to be an emerging convention in Indonesian political argumentation. Data from political interviews are analysed to show how participants employ overt reference to claim knowledge about the states of affairs or the addressee’s cognitive state, position themselves as the party responsible for claims and assertions, and solicit an aligning response from the addressee.

Jakarta Indonesian is a colloquial variety of Indonesian spoken primarily in Indonesia’s capital, where it was originally a contact variety between Betawi, the local variety of Malay, and Standard Indonesian. Like other varieties of Indonesian, Jakarta Indonesian is a language with a relatively open system of pronominal reference and multiple forms for self-reference. In this paper we focus on variation in the use of first-person pronouns in Jakarta Indonesian, using two corpora of spoken data collected three decades apart. We employ both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the form, function and social meaning of 1sg pronouns in Jakarta Indonesian, investigating both inter- and intra-speaker variation over time.

Recent sociolinguistic research on narrative has underlined the understanding of place as being both spatially defined and socially constituted through shared experience as well as contestation. Drawing on studies on the philosophy of place and the ‘small stories’ perspective, this study approaches place as an abstract concept in which spatial environment, people, objects, and activity come together as a unified, complex structure. Two Indonesian narratives are examined to illustrate the connectedness between the different elements that make up that structure. Ambiguous uses of temporal phrases and person references suggest that these elements (e.g., people and objects) are often undifferentiated. It is argued that the narratives are not simply stories about place but are stories enabled by place, that is, by presence in a spatial environment, encounter with people and objects, and engagement in shared activities through time, and which highlight self-identity as being deeply embedded in the identities of others.

This study draws on theories of information structure to examine the findings from Cum- ming’s (1991) study showing changing preferences in constituent order in Indonesian. Cum- ming found that predicate-initial clauses, an important grammatical resource for encoding events in Classical Malay, are diminishing in Indonesian, and agentive clauses are now pre- ferred. Based on data from fictional discourse and television reports, three clause structures are examined: [meN -V], [di-V-nya] and [ia V]. I show that the use of [meN -V] to denote successive events and to mark the climactic portion of a story episode illustrate most dramat- ically the preference for agentive clauses in Indonesian. I also argue that [di-V-nya] remains an important resource for encoding events but its pragmatic function seems to have weak- ened. This clause type is now mainly used to mark a new focus, drawing the addressee’s attention to a particular event or series of events. Meanwhile, objective voice [ia V] is also used to encode events; however, unlike [di-V-nya] which is structurally different from [meN - V], the use of [ia V] alongside agentive clause structure [ia meN -V] creates an impression of structural symmetry and can serve two goals simultaneously: marking event and signalling a new focus. It could be that, as the pragmatic force of [di-V-nya] is weakening, [ia V] is increasingly preferred for marking focal events.

This article explores new functions served by language varieties in fiction. Focusing our analysis on two types of texts in Indonesian – teen fiction and comics – we examine the interplay between standard and colloquial varieties to show how they are used together with non-verbal elements to promote youthful involvement. We identify three ways in which involvement is created in the texts: through free indirect discourse, non-verbal cues, and the gradual building of empathy indicated by shifting perspectives. We show that shifts from narrator’s to character’s perspective are shifts in alignment. By shifting to colloquial language, the narrator aligns their perspective with that of both the character and the reader, thus blurring the divisions between them. Non-verbal cues can also signal a shift in narrator roles, from a teller to a keen commentator and interlocutor who directly addresses the reader and invites them to share story-world experience. The frequent shifts between varieties represent a new style of writing which gives salience to the role of narrator as agent with a double persona: an anonymous agent who tells the reader about the characters in relation to the unfolding events, and an agent-participant who makes their presence known to the reader through direct address and evaluative commentary.

This article examines representations of adolescent social media interaction in two Indonesian teen novels to show how adolescent communication styles are typified. It is argued that public discourse on the potential danger of social media interaction is resounded in the novels. The article demonstrates that the authors of both novels take a similar moral stance on the issue of social media but use different rhetorical strategies for indexing that stance. Both draw on the social values of registers to communicate the stance. In Online addicted, standard Indonesian is used in narration to convey an authoritative voice and a stern moral tone, while the gaul register indexes an alignment with favourable aspects of the protagonist’s character. In Jurnal Jo online, gaul is similarly given a positive value by virtue of its juxtaposition with the Alay register. In this novel, gaul is the preferred, standard register. In both novels, there is a strong orientation toward “standardness”.

Teenlit, a genre of popular literature for adolescents, was introduced to Indonesia around the beginning of the last decade and almost immediately attracted a large readership consisting predominan...

This edited collection examines how people use a range of different modalities to negotiate, influence, and/or project their own or other people's identities. It brings together linguistic scholars concerned with issues of identity through a study of language use in various types of written texts, conversation, performance, and interviews.

The last few years have seen a boom in the publication of teen fiction in Indonesia. Particularly since the publication of the highly successful novel Eiffel ... I’m in love (Arunita 2001), numerous fiction works targeted at a youthful readership have appeared. This genre of popular literature has been so successful in attracting its audience that it currently constitutes the largest growing market in the Indonesian publishing industry (Simamora 2005). One of its striking characteristics is the predominant use of colloquial Indonesian, an informal variety of Indonesian that is closely identified with speakers from the capital Jakarta, particularly young people. Over a decade ago, scholars noted the increasing use of colloquial Indonesian in popular literature (see for example Adelaar and Prentice 1996:678). The implication is that this language variety has spread into domains previously dominated by standard Indonesian, the formal variety used in government administration, formal education, and most printed mass media. Indeed, contemporary Indonesian written literature is largely associated with standard Indonesian, such that the increasing use of colloquial Indonesian in popular literature has invited much criticism from language gatekeepers. Despite such criticism, however, teen fiction continues to flourish. The increasing use of colloquial Indonesian in teen fiction, though noted by scholars, has not been subject to any detailed linguistic study. Linguistic studies of colloquial Indonesian – at least those published in English – have focused so far on its use in speech, or in written texts intended to resemble speech, such as internet chatting and advice columns for young people. Prior to the recent surge in teen fiction, use of colloquial Indonesian in contemporary written literature was largely limited to dialogues. Writers such as Putu Wijaya, for example, are known to incorporate colloquialism to render dialogues more natural (Rafferty 1990:107). Teen fiction writers have extended the use of colloquialism into other parts of fiction such as the description of characters, settings, and inner thoughts. This development makes it interesting to look for a way to describe the increase of colloquialism. A useful approach is to examine the usage patterns of a term or a selection of terms in a number of teen fiction works published over time, with the purpose of observing changes in the patterns, and whether such changes can be shown to represent greater colloquialism. This study is a preliminary attempt in that direction. My purpose here is to demonstrate that in the last two decades during which colloquial Indonesian has been employed in teen fiction, there has been a shift in writing style from one that bears greater resemblance to standard Indonesian towards a style that is more colloquial. The term ‘style’ is commonly employed in sociolinguistics to refer to ways of speaking, which Bell (2001:139) defines in terms of the question ‘Why did the speaker say it this way on this occasion?’ (italics in original). Adapting this definition for teen fiction writing, I use ‘writing style’ here to refer to the characteristic manner in which an author writes fiction. This style is observed here by examining the use of the preposition pada ‘to, towards, on, in, at’ as compared to the use of three other prepositions, namely kepada ‘to, towards’, ke ‘to, towards’, and sama ‘to, towards, by, with’. The development towards increased colloquialism is shown through two indicators: a reduction in the range of prepositional meanings of pada along with the assignment of particular discourse functions to kepada, and an increased use of ke and sama. The data are drawn from ten works of fiction published between 1998 and 2005. Eight of these are written by the same author, Hilman. In four of them, Hilman collaborates with fellow writer Boim Lebon. The other two works are by Laire Siwi Mentari and Marthino Andries. This selection is motivated by the following considerations. Hilman’s works have been highly and consistently popular since his first publication appeared in 1986. They span two decades and therefore provide an appropriate time span for examining shifts in writing style. Laire Siwi Mentari and Marthino Andries are also successful writers; their first novels were published in 2004, followed by their second novels in 2005. This study makes use of their second novels.

This paper examines the assumption that the function of compound prepositions in Indonesian (e.g., di atas 'on top of', ke dalam 'into') is to add specificity. It is argued that, although compounds indeed serve this semantic function, they are not limited to it. Based on a study of a corpus of spoken and written Indonesian, it is shown that in many instances compounds do not add any semantic information other than what is expressible by their simple form counterparts. Compounds may be used simply to render explicit what is inferable from general knowledge. It is further argued that compounds are a marked category. Their distribution tends to be correlated with medium and type of discourse. In addition, as the more explicit or marked member of the simple/compound opposition, compounds serve a similar anaphoric function to full NPs. They can be considered as nonnominal markers that track locations and serve a number of other discourse functions, which include confirming a previously mentioned location, adding an affective dimension to an utterance, and marking discourse transitions. Compounds are therefore claimed to be multifunctional; and while in some instances either the semantic or pragmatic function predominates, in other instances both functions interact to produce the desired interpretation.

Indonesian distinguishes between three locative pronouns: sini 'here', situ 'there', and sana 'over there'. It has been argued that among these three pronouns, only sana can be used anaphorically. The middle category situ , although it cannot be used as an anaphor, has been argued to be the most neutral pronoun, in the sense that it has a wider distribution as a deictic: it can, for example, substitute for either of the other two pronouns where the reverse is not always plausible. Given the wide applicability of situ , this paper questions the basis for excluding this pronoun as an anaphor. It is demonstrated that the exclusion may be attributed to the way locative pronouns are categorized, how they relate to personal pronouns, and also how deixis and anaphora are defined. It is argued that all of the three locative pronouns can have deictic and anaphoric functions and that both functions can be simultaneously present in some contexts. In deictic use, the choice of one pronoun or the other is determined b...

This reference grammar provides a comprehensive description of the structure of the Indonesian language written in a clear, non-technical manner. It can be used by teachers and senior students who have no linguistic background.

This article examines a recent shift in the choice between two singular forms of first person pronoun in Indonesian, namely, aku and saya. More specifically, it seeks to explain motivating factors behind the recent tendency to use aku in public where it was previously considered unacceptable. By contrasting two temporally disjunctive public renditions of this pronoun, the article demonstrates not only that these renditions invite two different interpretations, but also more importantly, that the social expectation associated with aku is shifting. It is argued that theoretical constructs such as intimacy and formality, when viewed as opposing concepts, are inadequate for explaining the choice between the pronouns. The recent use of aku by celebrities in television interviews suggests that a pronoun conventionally associated with intimacy and informality can also be used strategically to assert individuality; moreover, while celebrities are a modern social phenomenon, variation in their pronominal choice is not explicable solely by an appeal to modernity. The article proposes that the recent shift to aku and the variation between aku and saya can be sufficiently explicated by considering these pronouns as linguistic representations of personal and social self-categorizations, respectively.

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