Clitics in Sasak, eastern Indonesia

Abstract

This paper is a discussion of the distribution of clitics in Sasak, an Austronesian(Western Malayo-Polynesian) language spoken by approximately two million people on the island of Lombok, eastern Indonesia. It outlines the types of clitics found Sasak and shows that there are interesting interactions between clitic placement and focus constructions that result in the violation of a number of canonical word orders in Sasak. The author argues that these violations can be seen as arising from competition for linear positions within the sentence; this can be accounted for within an optimality-theoretic syntax framework (Bresnan, 2000, Grimshaw, 1999) which describes sentence structures in terms of violable ranked constraints, the interaction of which accounts for observed structures as being the most optimal result of constraint competition.