Corpus linguistic and experimental studies on the meaning-preserving hypothesis in Indonesian voice alternations

5.1 Analysis for majukan, memajukan, and dimajukan

In the corpus data, there are 48 tokens of unprefixed majukan (after removing nine duplicates and typos): 8.33% (N = 4) occur in UV, and the rest are the unprefixed AV, which we excluded following Wouk (1996).

Figure 1 shows that UV is the least frequent voice in which majukan is found, compared to AV and PASS. No literal sense was found in the sample for AV memajukan, however one token was identified in the sample for PASS dimajukan; for this reason, we excluded the literal sense in the corpus analysis. Figure 2 visualizes the distribution of senses for memajukan and dimajukan.

Figure 1:

Distribution of majukan across voice (corpus data).

Figure 2:

Senses of majukan across voice (corpus data).

Figure 2 demonstrates a highly significant distribution and robust effect size (see the Cramér’s V values^[8]). The ‘advancing’ sense, as seen in (6), occurs more frequently in AV than PASS. The temporal ‘cause to happen earlier’ sense, exemplified in (2) and (1), is more predominant in PASS than AV. The ‘proposing’ sense, shown in (7), is also higher in PASS.

The association plot (Figure 3) shows these asymmetries more intuitively. The bluish bars rising above the line indicate a positive deviation from chance distribution, while the reddish bars falling below the line indicate a negative deviation. The luminosity signals association strength: the darker, the stronger (Levshina 2015: 220). Thus, ‘advancing’ strongly prefers AV; ‘cause to happen earlier’ and ‘proposing’ strongly prefer PASS.

Figure 3:

Association plot for majukan (corpus data).

Figure 4 displays the sentence-production data and reveals converging results, especially for ‘advancing’ and temporal senses. Participants did not produce sentences expressing ‘proposing’, parallel to (7). As in the corpus study, we compared the prefixed AV and PASS verbs, but included production data with literal senses. ‘Advancing’ and temporal senses are strongly associated with AV and PASS respectively, as in the corpus data: ‘advancing’ occurs significantly more often in AV but is dispreferred in PASS over ‘cause to happen earlier’. The literal sense of ‘caused forward motion’ is more frequent in PASS. The magnitude of these effects is strong (Cramér’s V = 0.872).

Figure 4:

Senses of majukan across voice (sentence-production data).

Figure 5 accentuates this correlation, mirroring the corpus results for ‘advancing’ and temporal senses (Figure 3). Participants appear to store detailed semantic preferences for majukan in AV and PASS.

Figure 5:

Association plot for majukan (sentence-production data).

5.2 Analysis for mundurkan, memundurkan, and dimundurkan

In the corpus data, the unprefixed mundurkan ‘cause to move something backward’ occurs in seven tokens (excluding duplicates) with only one in UV and the remaining in AV; they are excluded from the analysis. Figure 6 visualizes the distribution of senses for AV memundurkan and PASS dimundurkan.

Figure 6:

Senses of mundurkan across voice (corpus data).

The ‘postpone’ sense, as seen in (8), has nearly equal distribution in AV (64.7%; N = 33) and PASS (66.7%; N = 22). The literal sense (N = 16), exemplified in (5), appears more frequently in AV, while the sense ‘withdraw someone from a (structural) position; cause someone to step down’ (N = 10), shown in (9), is lower in AV (7.84%; N = 4) than in PASS (18.2%; N = 6). An additional sense that was attested relates to ‘retreat/change one’s mind’; see example (10).

The distributional asymmetry of these senses across voice is small and not statistically significant. This is depicted visually in Figure 7 via the grey shading, and highlights the meaning-preserving trait of mundurkan across voice types.

Figure 7:

Association plot for mundurkan (corpus data).

By way of contrast, the sentence-production data (Figure 8) shows a highly significant distribution with only a moderate effect. What stands out from Figure 8 is that the literal sense is more frequent in AV than in PASS, whereas ‘postpone’ is more frequent in PASS than in AV. These asymmetries represent strong deviations from the expected frequencies (Figure 9). This suggests that participants more strongly represent the literal sense in AV and ‘postpone’ in PASS, while the genre of the corpus data may have augmented the prominence of ‘postpone’ over the literal sense in AV (Figure 6). The sentence-production data reveals another sense that is absent in the corpus, namely ‘deteriorate’ (e.g. memundurkan kualitas/kesejahteraan/perekonomian ‘move back/deteriorate the quality/prosperity/economy’). So far, the results for mundurkan (this section) and majukan (Section 5.1) suggest the sense-sensitivity of voice alternation, where each sense is associated with a different voice (see Bernolet and Colleman [2016] for similar evidence in Dutch dative alternation).

Figure 8:

Senses of mundurkan across voice (sentence-production data).

Figure 9:

Association plot for mundurkan (sentence-production data).

5.3 Analysis for ajukan, mengajukan, and diajukan

All nine tokens for the root aju found in the corpus data function as modifiers meaning ‘advanced’ (e.g. tim aju ‘advanced team’). The AV mengaju is also attested, but we are treating those examples as mistakes, as the appropriate words in the examples where it is used would be mengaku ‘to admit something’ and mengacu ‘to refer to’. The PASS diaju is absent in the corpus. These AV and PASS forms are also absent from the KBBI entry.

The verbal form for aju is conventionally suffixed with -kan, and this base ajukan is attested in 763 tokens in the corpus; the number of UV tokens is significantly lower than the number of tokens of AV meN- and PASS di- (Figure 10).

Figure 10:

Distribution of ajukan across voice (corpus data).

The most frequent use of ajukan in KBBI is metaphoric, ‘to propose/put forward an idea/argument/refutation/candidate’, while the second sense is physical, ‘to bring to the front’. All tokens for ajukan in AV and PASS in the corpus convey ‘proposing’, as seen in (4) (X ² _{goodness-of-fit} = 0.005; df = 1; p _two-tailed = 0.943). The same is true for the sentence-production data (X ² _{goodness-of-fit} = 0.0497; df = 1; p _two-tailed = 0.824). This indicates that ajukan is meaning preserving across voice types.

5.4 Analysis for undur, undurkan, mengundurkan, and diundurkan

Figure 11 shows the distributional asymmetry of the bases undur and undurkan across voice types. The AV mengundurkan is much more frequent than the AV mengundur. In contrast, the PASS diundur is much more frequent than the PASS diundurkan. The UV form, only attested with undur, is significantly lower than expected compared to AV and PASS with undur (X ² _{goodness-of-fit} = 121.29; df = 2; p _two-tailed < 0.001).

Figure 11:

Distribution of undur and undurkan across voice (corpus data).

5.4.2 Undurkan

Unlike undur, the suffixed form undurkan predominantly expresses ‘cause to step down/resign’ (88.29%; N = 98) rather than ‘postpone’ (11.71%; N = 13). No literal sense is attested in the corpus. Figure 12 shows the distributional asymmetry of these senses across voice types.

Figure 12:

Senses of undurkan across voice (corpus data).

The strong effects include the preference for ‘postpone’ in PASS and its dissociation with AV, and the dispreference for ‘step down’ in PASS (Figure 13). The high frequency of ‘step down’ in AV is due to the fixed verb phrase mengundurkan diri ‘to cause oneself to step back; resign’; its PASS equivalent is unattested.

Figure 13:

Association plot for undurkan (corpus data).

The uneven distribution of senses across voice in the sentence-elicitation data (Figure 14) is also significant. The association plot (Figure 15) demonstrates that ‘postpone’ is strongly preferred in PASS while ‘cause to step down/resign’ is preferred in AV (again due to the fixed phrase mengundurkan diri). As in the corpus sample, no literal, physical meaning is produced by the participants for undurkan.

Figure 14:

Senses of undurkan across voice (sentence-production data).

Figure 15:

Association plot for undurkan (sentence-production data).

The analyses of majukan, mundurkan, and undur(kan) in AV and PASS reveal some parallelism in their senses. The opposing temporal senses (i.e. ‘happen earlier’ vs. ‘postpone’) demonstrate an affinity to PASS voice types in nearly all verbs studied (Table 3).

Table 3:

Parallelism across words for the interconnection of PASS and temporal meanings. “PASS > AV” indicates that the observed frequency of that sense is greater than expected in PASS compared to AV.

Temporal sense	Base	Data	Observed versus expected	Significance (and effect size)
‘happen earlier’	majukan	corpus	PASS > AV	p < 0.001; Cramér’s V = 0.838
		elicitation	PASS > AV	p < 0.001; Cramér’s V = 0.872
‘postpone’	mundurkan	corpus	PASS > AV	p > 0.1, ns; Cramér’s V = 0.223
		elicitation	PASS > AV	p < 0.001; Cramér’s V = 0.42
	undur	corpus	PASS > AV	Goodness-of-fit: p < 0.001
		elicitation	PASS > AV	Goodness-of-fit: p > 0.1, ns
	undurkan	corpus	PASS > AV	p < 0.001; Cramér’s V = 0.911
		elicitation	PASS > AV	p < 0.001; Cramér’s V = 0.886

6.1 Meaning-preserving hypothesis and voice alternation

This study highlights the dynamics of the meaning-preserving hypothesis for voice alternation in Indonesian. Quantitative analyses revealed a statistical tendency for a given sense to be associated with a particular voice morphology. This tendency indicates that a verb’s propensity to convey a particular sense involves distinct (morphological) constructions (Deignan 2006; Sokolova 2013), and is not only due to the semantics of its nominal collocates.

We have demonstrated that certain senses exhibit strong associations with certain voice forms, both in the corpus data and in the sentence-production data (e.g. a relatively strong correlation between temporal meanings and PASS di- compared to AV meN-; see Table 3). These findings provide initial support for McDonnell’s (2016) proposal (Section 3) that the statistical verb bias for a voice type could be driven by the verb’s semantic property. Our findings further support previous studies that have shown how syntactic alternations, such as the Dutch dative alternation and the Russian locative alternation, are sensitive to both verb senses (Bernolet and Colleman 2016), and the interaction between metaphor and constructions (Sokolova 2013). We have revealed that sense-sensitivity exists in Indonesian morphological voice alternation and argued that such alternations should be relativized to verb senses. Our results converge with recent work on the Indonesian hitting verb kena ‘be hit’; one of the senses of this verb is directly constructed in PASS without corpus evidence for the same sense in AV (Rajeg et al. 2020). This result corroborates the idea that PASS can have distinct semantic constraints from AV (Hilpert 2014: 41). More broadly, our study offers a new perspective into voice alternation in AN.

6.2 Usage-based construction grammar: implication and explanation

Our findings contribute to, and can be naturally explained within, the tenets of usage-based CxG (Diessel 2015; Goldberg 2006; Hilpert 2014). The first tenet is that frequency effects may impact the cognitive representation of linguistic knowledge (Diessel 2016; Diessel and Hilpert 2016; Hilpert and Diessel 2016). Frequent co-occurrence of a particular form with a particular meaning drives the automatization and conventionalization of that form-meaning pairing in production and processing (Diessel and Hilpert 2016). Some converging findings between our experimental and corpus data indicate that participants demonstrate some representation of the strong association between a given voice form of the verbs and the sense predominantly expressed in that form (e.g. frequent co-occurrences of PASS dimundurkan ‘cause to move back’ with time/event nouns to express ‘postpone’). This reflects the view that participants’ knowledge of the semantic preference of these verbs in a given voice is grounded in their frequent exposure to concrete usages of these verbs (Dąbrowska 2009). Such high token co-occurrence frequencies of the verbs in certain contexts lead to their “automatization” (Diessel 2016: 226), building associative links between the verbs’ voice form and the sense expressed. Statistical tendencies, as employed in this paper, provides one measure for the strength of the associative links (Diessel 2016: 226–229).

The second tenet of usage-based CxG is the idea that grammar consists of “a unified repository of form-meaning pairings”, that is, constructions (Hilpert and Diessel 2016: 58). These encompass not only abstract grammatical constructions but also concrete tokens of linguistic units (e.g. specific collocations, partially schematic multi-word expressions), including their frequencies (Goldberg 2006: 45). Constructions form hierarchical networks and are connected through different links (e.g. inheritance, polysemy, and subpart links; Hilpert and Diessel 2016). In usage-based CxG, we can investigate usage patterns of specific verbs and not just abstract grammatical constructions (Goldberg 2006: 45).

Converging evidence from our corpus and experimental data suggests that participants retain item-specific knowledge of the verbs (Goldberg 2006: 49, 56; Hilpert 2014: 66), particularly the semantic bias of a verb in one voice construction over the other, given that AV and PASS are available for the senses. A previous study on English eat and drink verbs (Newman and Rice 2006) showed that even different inflections of these verbs have different co-occurrence behaviours. Evidence for such item-specific knowledge also comes from studies on child language acquisition (Tomasello 2000, 2003). The conventionality of the expression of a certain sense in a certain voice could not be predicted by the meaning-preserving hypothesis, since the hypothesis implicitly assumes an equal status for the senses to be expressed in all voice types, while specific usage patterns of the verbs reveal distributional asymmetries. The conventional usage of specific verbs must be accounted for as part of speakers’ linguistic repertoire and not only the abstract patterns (Goldberg 2006: 56).

The hierarchical network model of linguistic knowledge (Hilpert 2014: 57–67) and the role of frequency effects in usage-based CxG, including construction morphology (CxM; Booij 2010), can handle the fact that voice alternation is more than simply a re-alignment of syntactic function and semantic role. In CxM, morphologically complex words are viewed as morphological constructions (Booij 2010: 17), having holistic morphosyntactic, morphosemantic, and usage properties (Hilpert 2014: 80). Specific AV and PASS prefixed forms (e.g. memajukan and dimundurkan) are still connected to their constructional schemas, namely meN-x-kan and di-x-kan (where “x” is the base). These schemas emerge as generalizations over concrete tokens of complex words with the same patterns (e.g. memundurkan, dimundurkan, mengajukan, diajukan; Booij 2010). The predictable properties inherited from these schemas by the specific words are the schematic meaning of the voice prefixes meN- and di- and the suffix -kan. The network model in CxG and CxM allows specific words to have their idiosyncrasy (e.g. semantic preference and frequency) that may not be fully predicted by, but is still connected to, the schema (Hilpert 2014: 80).

The -kan suffix, when unified with an intransitive base maju ‘move forward’, contributes its causative meaning, Actor/Causer role, and transitive argument-structure to majukan ‘to cause to move forward’; the intransitive SUBJ fuses with the OBJ role of -kan (Arka 1993). The unification of the prefix meN- with transitive majukan accentuates that its SUBJ is the Causer/Actor irrespective of the words specifying this slot, while di- specifies that the SUBJ is the Undergoer (Arka and Manning 2008; Gil 2002). The strong association between the complex AV verb memajukan and ‘advancing’ or between PASS dimajukan and temporal meaning, for instance, is not predicted by only knowing the semantics of those morphological formatives, but also via recurrent collocational patterns of these verbs with certain types of OBJ. The specific verbs also inherit a prominence effect depending on the AV SUBJ and PASS SUBJ. Given the temporal and ‘advancing’ senses of majukan, for instance, it could be that in the former it is the event or time argument that is considered to be more profiled (Maldonado 2007: 833), rather than the Actor advancing the schedule; hence its SUBJ status and the preference for PASS. For the ‘advancing’ sense, the active nature of such an event may need to be highlighted, hence its preference for AV. Despite such analyses, general semantic or grammatical rules cannot predict the co-occurrence patterns of (non-)metaphoric senses and the voice construction of verbs (Diessel 2016: 213). Why is the temporal sense not preferred in AV memajukan over PASS dimajukan, or vice versa for ‘advancing’, given that the time/event and abstract/institution arguments have the same opportunity to be more prominent? Sentence-production data suggests that speakers may have encountered the temporal sense more frequently in PASS than AV, and such frequency effects are attested in the corpus sample (cf. Diessel 2016: 213).