98 Chapter 4 Morphology
However, when suffixed to other adjectives, the result is a comparative adjec-
tive as in
(4) pote ‘white’ poteyan ‘whiter’
penter ‘smart’ penterran ‘smarter’
And further, when modifying an noun, certain adjectives with -an denote the
quality of having been applied to the object, as reported by Stevens (1968).
(5) aeng ‘water’ + kotor ‘dirty’ aeng kotoran ‘dishwater’
berras ‘rice’ + antre ‘stand in line’ berras antreyan ‘rationed rice’
Finally, when applied to other adjectival stems, -an derives an adjective denot-
ing a collective quality of a plural noun, as reported by Stevens (1968).
(6) juko' guringan ‘fried food’ (guring ‘fry’)
oreng jaba'an ‘Javanese’
As is apparent from these examples and examples to follow, there is a
great deal of homophony and polysemy in the set of inflectional and derivation-
al affixes.^2 Beyond this though, the multifunctionality of some affixes contri-
butes to a peculiarity of the Madurese system: the difficulty in determining ab-
solutely whether a particular morpheme should be considered inflectional or
derivational. Here, the iterative and the comparative morphemes seem to be
clearly inflectional uses and the nominal and adverbial uses to be clearly deriva-
tional. The use in compounds is somewhat equivocal but falls on the side of
derivation. Added to this seeming indeterminacy is the possibility of precate-
gorial roots. To the extent that precategorial roots are determined to be N, V or
Adj after affixation, those affixes could be considered derivational and not
merely inflectional, despite the fact that the morphology appears to have an
inflectional function with clearly N, V, or Adj roots and stems.
As it can be difficult to determine whether a particular type of morpholo-
gy is derivational or inflectional, rather than attempting to organize this discus-
sion in this way, affixes will be presented in terms of the lexical class of the
resulting word, taking verbs, nouns, and adjectives in turn.
(^2) As homophony and polysemy can be relatively difficult to sort out in this context,
whether a particular form is properly one or the other will be left an open question here
to focus on other aspects of morphology.