SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This thesis is a transformational generative account of the phonology of Bahasa Indonesia ('Indonesian (language)'), the national and official language of the Republic of Indonesia. The thesis is organized into six chapters. The first chapter, Introduction, presents a brief description of the background of the thesis. The second chapter deals with the problem of the representation of morphemes both on the phonological and phonetic levels. The discussion is focused on the establishment of units of morpheme representations (i.e. segments and features) which are necessary on the phonological level. The third and the fourth chapters are devoted to the discussion of the problem of the well-formedness of morphemes in 'Bahasa Indonesia'. In Chapter 3 the discussion is focused on the formulation of conditions which express admissible sequences of phonological elements (C and V) within morphemes. In Chapter.;the discussion concentrates on the details of the morpheme well-formednessby examining the constraints that 'Bahasa Indonesia' imposes on the distribution of segments within morphemes and on the structure of segments independent from their environments. The fifth chapter deals with the problem of phonetic forms of morphemes which are different from their underlying forms. The discussion is directed to the formulation of rules which correctly account for variations in shape that morphemes undergo in various environments and at the same time adequately capture phonological generalisations of 'Bahasa Indonesia'. Finally, Chapter 6 presents the summary of the study and a number of concluding remarks.