This paper develops a new analysis of partial wh-movement in Indonesian, a construction which raises seemingly challenging problems for criterial freezing. It is proposed that partially-moving wh-phrases in Indonesian are structured as focused expressions properly containing a wh-interrogative phrase. It is argued that the derivation of partial wh-movement in Indonesian involves sub-extraction, or movement out of a moved element, to evade a freezing violation that would otherwise ensue. More specifically, it involves focus movement of the focused XP to the intermediate non-interrogative C-system, followed by sub-extraction of the QP from the XP to the matrix interrogative C-system. The analysis receives independent empirical support from the amelioration of freezing effects observed in focused wh-questions in Japanese.

The aim of the present study was to determine whether bilinguals activate the figurative meaning of an idiom that is specific to one language when they are exposed to its translation in their other language. We used a cross-modal priming task in which participants heard L2 English sentences that ended with an idiom translated from their L1. They then saw a visually presented stimulus that was either related to the meaning of the L1 idiom, a matched control word, or a nonword, and made a lexical decision. Three experiments were run, each with a different group of bilinguals (French–English, Vietnamese–English, and Indonesian–English), and each with a monolingual English control group. In all three studies, the effect of relatedness for bilinguals and monolinguals differed, demonstrating cross-language activation of idiom meanings. Evidence was obtained that suggested that culture-specific information in idioms influenced processing.

Although it has been proposed that all languages may have some lexical stress property, recent studies of (Standard) Indonesian have concluded, based primarily on perception, that lexical stress is not present in this language. While it is philosophically problematic to prove the non-existence of a phenomenon, we examine data from a large-scale production study for both direct and indirect evidence of stress, contributing to the growing body of literature in this field. In the first case, evidence is sought that indicates that a particular syllable in a word exhibits acoustic properties typically associated with prominence (i.e. fundamental frequency (f0), duration, intensity, vowel quality). In the second case, evidence of enhancement of these properties on a particular syllable under focus is sought, for a more abstract stress property that is not overtly manifested at the word level. Although we find no evidence of lexical prominence, we observe acoustic patterns consistent with a higher level prominence corresponding to focus, manifested by strong (Intonational Phrase) boundary properties. Overall, our findings reveal that there is strong support for a class of languages lacking lexical stress, and in the absence of a stressed syllable to enhance, focus may be manifested prosodically as boundary properties.

We intended to establish if two lexical tone contrasts in Zhumadian Mandarin, one between early and late aligned falls and another between early and late aligned rises, are perceived categorically, while the difference between declarative and interrogative pronunciations of these four tones is perceived gradiently. Presenting stimuli from 7-point acoustic continua between tones and between intonations, we used an identification task and a discrimination task with an experimental group of native listeners and a control group of Indonesian listeners, whose language employs none of the differences within either the falling or the rising pitch contours in its phonology. Only the lexical condition as perceived by the experimental group yielded sigmoid identification functions and a heightened discriminatory sensitivity around the midpoint of continua. The intonational condition in the native group and both conditions in the control group yielded gradient identification functions and smaller, reverse effects of the continuum midpoints in the discrimination task. The results are interpreted to mean that sentence modality contrasts can be expressed gradiently, but that lexical tone differences are represented phonologically, and hence are perceived categorically, despite low phonetic salience of the contrast. This conclusion challenges assumptions about the relation between linguistic functions and linguistic structures.

This study uses data from loanwords in Indonesian to argue for a phonological analysis using Harmonic Grammar (e.g. Smolensky & Legendre 2006, Pater, Bhatt & Potts 2007, Pater 2009). In original data consisting of Arabic and Dutch loanwords containing initial and final consonant clusters produced by 24 native speakers of Indonesian, we find both deletion and epenthesis to resolve word-final clusters, while word-initial clusters sometimes have epenthesis and sometimes are tolerated intact. The adaptations of Arabic and Dutch loanwords reveal the influence of three markedness constraints generally observed in Indonesian (*ComplexCoda, *ComplexOnset, and MinWord), and support a role for phonology in the analysis of borrowing, rather than a purely perceptual approach. When native monosyllables and borrowed monosyllables without clusters are considered, we find evidence that a standard Optimality Theory strict ranking is inadequate to account for the data; these constraints must be allowed to ‘gang up’, as in Harmonic Grammar, to account for the deletions, epenthesis, and non-adaptations found in the data.

This article examines how portrayals of Javanese and Indonesian in language policy, the media, and educational settings might lead to enregisterment. This process of association of context to language over time and across space represents knowledge that Indonesians can appropriate in talk. A multidisciplinary approach is used to examine audio and video recordings of Javanese-Indonesian bilingual talk conducted in meetings held in a government office in Central Java, Indonesia. Although the findings are contrary in some ways to earlier descriptions of Javanese and Indonesian usage – for example, in talk containing code alternation there is no one-to-one relationship between hierarchical social relations and code – nevertheless such contradictions can be accounted for by viewing the enregisterment process as merely providing “constituting possibilities” to speakers in situated interaction.I would like to thank the Faculty of Letters, Diponegoro University and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences for help in gaining permission to conduct research in Indonesia. I would also like to thank the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University (LTU), and the Wodonga campus of LTU for the sabbatical leave to conduct this research and for three grants that supported fieldwork in Indonesia. Most important, I would also like to thank the participants in this research, who cannot be named here. Finally, I would like to thank Cecep Wihandi and Junaeni Goebel for their help with initial transcriptions, and Paul Black, Pauline Savy, Peter Burns, two anonymous reviewers, and Barbara Johnstone for their valuable feedback on this work, although all errors remain mine.