Complementation in colloquial Indonesia conversation: A discourse -functional perspective

Recent work in discourse-functional linguistics has demonstrated the centrality of studying grammar in its natural context of everyday interactional use. This dissertation investigates one grammatical category, namely sentential complementation---a clause which serves as a syntactic argument of another predicate. Using a corpus of approximately four hours of colloquial Indonesian conversation, I investigate whether there is in fact evidence to justify clauses functioning as arguments of other clauses. I conclude that the weight of the evidence suggests complementation is not a viable grammatical category in this language variety.;I discuss clauses m series with no overt connectives, and I also analyse clauses linked by the word bahwa, which is generally understood as a complementizer Both of these constructions show similar semantic characteristics to what is described cross-linguistically for complements: the verb in the first clause is a verb of cognition, utterance, perception, or epistemicity; and, the second clause is semantically framed by the first. For each of these constructions, I seek structural evidence-both prosodic and morphosyntactic---to justify their membership in a grammatical category of complements. However, because colloquial Indonesian lacks the morphosyntactic cues generally described in the literature as providing evidence that a clause is functioning as a grammatical argument of another clause, the applicability of this grammatical category for the data is doubtful.;I additionally analyze another frequent construction in colloquial Indonesian---'epistemic -nya constructions'---which also has semantic characteristics generally associated with complementation. However, these constructions have a grammatical structure diametrically opposite of morphosyntactic complements, since in these constructions it is the framing predicate which is itself embedded as an adverb within the framed material. This construction illustrates the diversity of grammatical resources which a language can employ for encoding similar semantic functions as complementation proper.;This dissertation seeks to present a systematic, discourse-based study of sentential complementation in colloquial Indonesian conversation. Such a focus will enhance the linguistic understanding of this language variety, which is not well-described in the literature. More generally, this study contributes to ongoing research in grammar in discourse, and the ways in which language form is shaped by language use.