Chapter 6 Clause types
This chapter provides an overview of simplex clauses in Madurese, both verbal
and non-verbal, declarative and non-declarative. While certain aspects of clause
structure are detailed in later chapters, the clause types exemplified here are
those that occur in many of the examples in the following chapters. Basic word
order is illustrated and briefly discussed and the final section of the chapter
takes up grammatical relations and a restriction on subjects which sets them
apart from other clausal constituents.
1. Basic word order
Canonical word order in Madurese is SVO, just as is true of Indonesian, Java-
nese, Sundanese and other Indonesian-type languages. This has been clear in
previous examples of basic transitive clauses, and is illustrated again in (1),
where sengko' ‘I’ is the subject, ngenom ‘drink’ is the verb and kopi ‘coffee’ is
the object.
(1) Sengko' ng-enom kopi.
I AV-drink coffee
‘I drink coffee.’
And Madurese is quite regularly head-initial, consistent with many of the
word order correlations suggested in Joseph Greenberg’s work (Greenberg
1966) and proposals of those of others (Vennemann (1972), Hawkins (1988),
Dryer (1992)). As is true of many VO languages, Madurese has prepositions,
illustrated again in (2).
(2) a. dha' Sorbaja
to Surabaya
‘to Surabaya’
b. e kantor
at office
‘at the office’
Also consistent with expectations, attributive adjectival modifiers follow the
nouns they modify.