An intermediate syntax problem from Indonesian

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Gerald Sanders

Abstract

This problem was originally constructed for use as part of a
take-home preliminary examination for Ph.D. candidates at the University of Minnesota. It is of moderate difficulty, and could be appropriately used, I believe, for practice or examination purposes in any intermediate, or second-term, syntax course for advanced undergraduates or graduate students. The basic focus and data for the problem are taken from Sandra Chung's article, "On the subject of two passives in Indonesian", which appears in Charles N. Li (ed.) Subject and Topic, pp. 57-98 (New York: Academic Press, 1976). Although it provides some basis for practice on nearly all major aspects of syntactic analysis, the primary challenges of the problem center around the analysis of alternations in grammatical relations of the active-passive type and through the superordination or
promotion of arguments of semantically subordinate predications. I have made certain minor simplifications and regularizations of Chung's original data, chiefly in the area of morphology, but these do not affect any of the major syntactic generalizations at issue.

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