LINGUIST List 8.913: Sneddon: Indonesian Grammar LINGUIST List 8.913 Sat Jun 21 1997 Review: Sneddon: Indonesian Grammar Editor for this issue: Andrew Carnie What follows is another discussion note contributed to our Book Discussion Forum. We expect these discussions to be informal and interactive; and the author of the book discussed is cordially invited to join in. If you are interested in leading a book discussion, look for books announced on LINGUIST as "available for discussion." (This means that the publisher has sent us a review copy.) Then contact Andrew Carnie at carnielinguistlist.org Message 1: Sneddon: Indonesian Grammar Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 17:38:31 +0100 From: Mark Donohue Subject: Sneddon: Indonesian Grammar BOOK REVIEW Sneddon, James Neil. 1996. Indonesian: a comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge. xxviii + 369 pages + references + 13 pages of index. US$35.00. Reviewed by Mark Donohue, University of Manchester: mark.donohueman.ac.uk Synopsis. Sneddon (S) states that "This is a description of the Indonesian language for English-speaking teachers and learners and for any others interested in the language and its structures." (p1), and many formatting and content choices flow from this simple statement, a point to which I shall often return later. After a detailed table of contents, S has put a 14 page glossary of all the terminology he has used in the book. This is written in such a way that the non-specialist and specialist alike are able to appreciate the definitions given there - for the linguist, it is always useful to have a potentially ambiguous term defined as it is used in the book or article in question, and S accomplishes this in enough detail to satisfy the linguist, but not so much that the non-linguist will feel overwhelmed. Skipping the introduction for the moment, S has chosen to divide the book into four large chapters, rather than a more specialised set of smaller chapters; this has had remarkably little affect on the readability of the work, and the findability of the subsections - aided by an exhaustive 12 page index at the back of the book. These chapters are unabashedly functional, and are discussed individually below: Words This chapter covers the usual word formation processes that occur in a language, including a discussion of the morphophonemic changes that are created when certain nasal-bearing prefixes occur; indeed, this is the only discussion of anything phonological in the book, a fact that points to the necessity of having a teacher as a model. The discussion of affixing morphology is both complete and detailed, especially when it comes to the discussion of verbal morphology, which presents a depth of detail on the topic that is rarely made available in grammars of languages, and indeed rarely surfaces even in specialist works on a particular construction. Phrases In this chapter the components, orders, and restrictions of noun phrases and adjectival phrases are dealt with, with sections dealing with specifics like pronominal usage (over 15 pages!), prepositional phrases, adjuncts and what S calls the 'predicate phrase', which includes verbs and their immediate constituents, or any other lexical class that is serving as a predicate. Interestingly, for a chapter that is divided up according to lexical classes as this one is, we find no discussion, in this chapter or the preceding one, on the criteria used to establish these as separate word classes. Pedagogically this is probably the right approach to take, so as not to confuse students who most probably do speak languages with these distinct word classes, but descriptively we are somewhat cheated. Clauses As with the preceding chapter, the discussion of clauses is arranged according to the lexical class of the predicate. The main part of the chapter deals with the word order possibilities, ad the effects of using a verb in the "active" or "passive" voice. S's use of the traditional terminology, rather than something reflecting more recent advances in analysis, is again justified: it makes the book more accessible to a wider audience, and (in my opinion the best argument), S explicitly defines the notions of "active" and "passive" in his extensive glossary of terms at the beginning of the book, so that a reader in doubt about the precise sense in which a word is used need only refer here. The chapter also contains an extensive discussion of what S calls "derived clause types, referring to Topic-comment constructions, relative clauses, quoted speech, and other types of subordinated clauses. As usual, his treatment of these topics is at the same time broad and deep, and can be recommended as a model for others writing grammars to follow. Sentences This final chapter deals with actually producing speech, in real sentences, and contains information about different speech acts, sentence tags, and various other devices required to sound natural when speaking. I suspect that regular users of this book will refer to this section more frequently than the others, since this information is constantly required in production. Luckily, S's treatment is detailed enough to stand the test of a lot of time. The second half of the chapter is perhaps the most useful, and most interesting: here, in addition to dealing with strategies for coordination and subordination, and an assortment of complex sentence linkers, S also includes a section on ellipsis. Alas, this is only five pages long, but it does prepare the student for the extensive ellipsis of arguments that is such a feature of spoken Indonesian; and at this point the book deviates form S's stated intentions to describe "standard formal Indonesian. This can loosely be identified as the language of government, administration and the mass media in the Republic of Indonesia". The language in this final section is rich in ellipsis, and bridges the gap (though a competent teacher will be needed to ensure that the gap is bridged gradually) between the formal variety of Indonesian exemplified elsewhere in the book with the type that students will be more likely to hear away from the offices of Jakarta,; my only regret is that this final section is only five pages long. Evaluation. I am always slightly annoyed to read reviews which glow, and which praise a book endlessly without seeming to offer enough harsh (constructive) criticism to let me feel that I am really reading a review that will help me to decide whether the book in question is good enough to warrant buying, or merely good. I fear that I am have written such a review. I have found S's grammar to be topical, complete, and thorough enough to provide useful information and examples for many years to come, and with enough breadth to act as a guide for others planning on writing a grammar of a well known national language. There are points on which S can be criticised, but they are few, and in the main trifling. The organisation of the book is such that a naive reader would have little idea of the use of many of the morphological constructions presented in the first chapter, since there is no overview, or typological summary of the language. S has written his grammar for a particular audience, namely teachers and students of Indonesian, and so this is not a problem for that target audience. For a linguist with absolutely no idea of the language, S's book could well be bewildering: the lack of interlinear glosses anywhere, the frequent absence of translations in the first chapter, and the lack of a glossary of Indonesian words anywhere could make this grammar rather impenetrable. On the other hand, dictionaries and articles discussing Indonesian are not hard to come by, and so this criticism cannot be levelled too harshly. Had S glossed and offered translations for every example given, and there are many, then the book would have doubled in size. Given that Indonesian is not an otherwise unknown language, S's decision to write for a target audience, and to refer to other dictionaries and other works published on the language, is understandable. A grammar of a previously described language must make a contribution in terms of coverage or completeness, and S has certainly achieved that. S has chosen not to include a detailed account of the phonology of Indonesian; partly, this is excusable given that his target audience consists of people who already speak, or are learning form someone who can speak, the language, but for a wider audience it is perhaps somewhat unfortunate. Only peripherally do we learn that the grapheme {e} represents both the front mid unrounded vowel and the schwa, for instance. Another (possible) omission in the book is more discussion than the five final pages of ellipsis, and the tendency to use non-inflected verb forms. S has allowed for this, however: as stated before, he announces that he is writing a reference grammar of formal, written Indonesian, and so describes this. It now remains for further studies, by S or others with experience in Indonesia, to fill in this gap in out knowledge. The organisation of the book is rather un-intuitive, with only four main chapters leading to a proliferation of subsections, without any immediately apparent hierarchical grouping. Since such grouping is implicit in the organisation of the table of contents, it would be nice to see subsequent editions with a revised system, one that will also make the index more accessible. Given the increasing demand for good grammars and textbooks on Indonesian, S's book has found a niche in the former category, and given the availability of materials on Indonesian the grammar is detailed enough to be a welcome addition to the library of anyone working on the language. Biography Mark Donohue (Department of Linguistics, University of Manchester) is has worked in Eastern Indonesian on and off for the last five years. He has worked mainly on the Tukang Besi language of Southeast Sulawesi, a grammar of which is soon (?) to appear. More details can be found at www.leland.stanford.edu/~donohue/mark/. 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