Abstract:
This paper discuss the ellipses of noun phrases that are assumed to be in the compound sentences of Malay. These phenomena of ellipses have long been questioned by the Dutch and English scholars since the 19th century but today’s Malay grammar textbooks do not show the effect of referring to the fruits of their studies. We found various pattern of the ellipses of noun phrases in the compound sentences of Malay that do not fit the explanations of Malay grammar textbooks used widely as a guide now. Among these, there are some patterns of compound sentences that will produce odd answers if those explanations are applied to them.
This means that contemporary scholars do not look at the facts of Malay. These pattern involve the grammatical voice of Malay verbs. The ellipsis of noun phrase is actually an assumption that is put forward to clarify the function of the noun phrases that carry the old information in the compound sentences in terms of economy of language. We should not ignore a hypothesis that it is not an ellipsis of noun phrase that occurs in the compound sentence but the predicate verb in the following clause focus on a phrase that it refers to in the preceding clause of the compound sentence. In other words, only lexical information contained in a noun phrase is shared between the clauses of a compound sentence without involving the grammatical cases of a noun that are only assumed in the analyses of Malay sentences.
