Malay Comparative and Superlative

Bakar, Norsofiah Abu and Yusoff, Radiah (2019) Malay Comparative and Superlative. European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences, 89. pp. 677-686. ISSN 2357-1330

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Abstract

In the Malay language, comparatives, such as ‘lebih’ (<> more) and ‘kurang’ (<> less), and superperlatives, such as ‘paling’ (<> most’) and ‘sangat’ (<> very), are said to exist with an adjective phrase, for example, ‘lebih besar’ (<> bigger), ‘kurang manis’ (<> less sweet), ‘paling cantik’ (<> most beautiful’), and ‘sangat besar’ (<> biggest). Comparatives and superlatives in Malay are categorised as intensifiers. Comparatives and superlatives in Malay are also expressed with the use of the affixes ‘ter-’ and ‘se-’. Grammarians claim that comparatives and superlatives forms collate with adjective structure. Based on this claim, this study aims at describing the comparatives and superlatives features. The features are examined using the corpus from Korpus DBP and Corpora Collection Leipzig University. Which are then generated using Antconc. The results from Antconc show comparatives and superlatives characters and statistics. The study shows that comparatives ‘lebih’ (<> more) and ‘kurang’ (<> less) and superlatives ‘paling’ (<> most) and ‘sangat’ (<> very) forms exist with count phrase, verb phrase, and prepositional phrase. Besides, this study shows that the meanings expressed by comparatives and superlatives when combined with an adjective phrase are different from comparatives and superlatives that collocate with count phrase, verb phrase, and prepositional phrase.

Item Type: Article
Subjects: P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics > P1-1091 Philology. Linguistics(General)
P Language and Literature > PL Languages and literatures of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania > PL5051-5497 Malayan (Indonesian) languages
Divisions: Pusat Pengajian Ilmu Kemanusiaan (School of Humanities) > International Conference on Humanities (ICH)
Koleksi Penganjuran Persidangan (Conference Collection) > International Conference on Humanities (ICH)
Depositing User: Mr Musa Mohamed Ghazali
Date Deposited: 13 Jan 2021 09:11
Last Modified: 13 Jan 2021 09:11
URI: http://eprints.usm.my/id/eprint/48091

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