Analysis Of Malay Locative Prepositions Within The Framework OfRole And Reference Grammar (RRG)

The purposes of this article are to reveal and to discuss the characteristics and the patternsof Malay prepositions based on verb semantic structures. This article proposes that theverbs classes which share the same semantic structures have the similar relationship withthe occurrence of the prepositions in the clause. In this article, the discussion of therelationship between the verbs and the presence of the prepositions is based on thenotation and semantics concept of Role and Reference Grammar Theory - Van Valin andLaPolla (1997) and Van Valin (2005). Semantic representation in RRG is based onpredicate representation, namely the verbs which are constructed by Aktionsartdecomposition. Aktionsart is a lexical class to which a verb belongs by virtue of the typeof process, state, and so forth, that it designates. Aktionsart class is divided into states,activities, achievements, accomplishment, active accomplishment, and a causativeversion of each of them. Representation for the Aktionsart decomposition class is called“Logical Structure” (LS). Three types of locative prepositions are scrutinized to examinethe link, namely di, ke and dari. In this regard this article will reveal the LS ofprepositions and also investigate how the occurrence of locative prepositions can bepredicted and determined by the LS of Malay verbs. The data are amassed from twonovels, namely Biuh and Noni.