THE EFFECT OF INFORMATION STRUCTURE ON THE INDONESIAN DI- PASSIVE

Abstract

Passives are standardly defined as an operation whereby the patient argument of an active clause occupies the subject position in the passive clause. The obvious result of the operation allows a passive clause to undergo a reduction of valence in which the agent role of the erstwhile clause is relegated to unsubcategorized argument, the oblique adjunct. Based on the data on naturally occurring sentences in Indonesian, I show that passive transformation bears on an information packaging in which the active clause enters into the arrangement of information having to do with familiarity. It is shown that based on discourse familiarity (discourse-old and discourse new information), the Indonesian dipassive is divided into two types: agentless passives and agentive passive. The agentless passive allows an indefinite subject while the agentive passive does not. Importantly, the uniqueness tied to Indonesian is that the construction realizing the agentive passive construction may retain the agent argument but the preposition oleh ‘by’ is deleted yielding the structure of an active clause exhibiting what is commonly known as OV/ object-focus construction.