150 Chapter 6 Clause types
(3) a. mored penter
student smart
‘smart student’
b. bengko raja
house big
‘big house’
Relative clauses follow their head.
(4) a. mored se dhateng
student REL come
‘the student who came’
b. baji' se tedhung
baby REL sleep
‘the baby who is sleeping’
And it will be clear in ensuing pages that Madurese is consistent with the major-
ity of universal tendencies posited in the word order literature.
While consistent with these universal predictions based on its neutral
word order, Madurese word order is not rigid. In natural speech, the order of
basic constituents in a clause can be quite fluid. Even a cursory examination of
the texts in Chapter 16 makes this clear. Thus, alongside SVO structure we find
transitive sentences such as (5) and (6).
(5) Aher-ra prao se rosak gella', kalaban ka-penter-an, tre-santre-na
end-DEF boat REL ruined before with NOM-clever RED-student-DEF
Ke Moko pas ma-becce' pole.
Ke Moko then AV.CS-good again
‘At last the boat that had been damaged, cleverly, Ke Moko's students
fixed it.’
(6) E-tenggu kembang-nga, kembang jiya, moso Joko Tole.
OV-see flower-DEF flower this by Joko Tole
‘Joko Tole saw the flower, the white, shining flower, and then burned it
up.’
In the sentence in (5), the direct object aherra prao se rosak gella' ‘the boat that
was damaged’ precedes the adverbial prepositional phrase, klaban kapenteran
‘with cleverness’, which precedes the subject tre-santrena Ke Moko ‘Ke Mo-
ko’s students’. In the sentence in (6), the verb in the object voice precedes the
subject kembangnga ‘the flower’ , and the agent occurs following that in a pre-