Open class categories 67
(16) Oreng rowa se daddi guru.
person that REL become teacher
‘That person is who is a teacher.’
(17) Se daddi kapala aba'na.
REL become head he/she
‘He/She is who is the head.’
The ability to distinguish noun roots from verb (and adjective) roots on
the basis of these morphological and syntactic facts provides evidence for re-
cognizing the category noun in Madurese.
1.2 The category verb
It is somewhat more difficult to establish lexical distinctions on the basis of
verb roots. A great many verbs require morphology that also serves to derive
verbs from nouns, adjectives, and other roots, attesting to the extreme produc-
tivity of this morphology. This makes it difficult at times to determine exactly
what is derivational morphology and what is inflectional morphology, a situa-
tion quite apparent in the chapter on morphology, which follows. This is not to
say that Madurese lacks specifically verbal properties. Quite the contrary. But
as most verbs are in a sense derived, these properties will not distinguish classes
of lexical roots. There are, however, some characteristics that seem to accrue
only to verb roots and not to verbals more generally.
First, although it is certainly not a property of all roots in this class, the
only roots that can take the accidental or involitive prefix ta- are verbs.
(18) toles ‘write’ tatoles ‘written accidentally’
buwang ‘discard’ tabuwang ‘discarded accidentally’
mole ‘go home’ tamole^5 ‘go home by mistake’
entar ‘go’ taentar ‘go accidentally’
penter ‘smart’ tapenter
pote ‘white’ tapote
kotor ‘dirty’ takotor
roma ‘house’ taroma
saba ‘field’ tasaba
ebu' ‘mother’ taebu'
(^5) There is speaker variability in the use of ta-. Some speakers cannot use the prefix with
active intransitives such as mole ‘go home’ and entar ‘go’ but do accept it with certain
other intransitive predicates such as tedhung ‘sleep’ and toju' ‘sit’. See Chapter 9 sec-
tion 6.2 for further discussion.