Negotiating Self-Reference in Colloquial Indonesian Conversation

 

Robert Englebretson

Rice University

Linguistics

This paper addresses the multiple first-person reference forms available to speakers of colloquial Indonesian. Based on an analysis of a corpus of nearly 4 hours of naturally-occurring conversation, I argue that the traditional motivations which have been proposed for the usage of the various first-person reference forms (specifically: regional origin and age of speakers, social intimacy, and formality level of the speech event) do not fully or accurately account for the range of uses observed in actual discourse data. I demonstrate that much of a speaker’s ‘choice’ among first-person referential forms is arrived at in the course of interaction, and emerges from intersubjective positioning in the discourse.

Indonesian speakers have numerous ways of referring to themselves: first-person pronominal forms saya, aku, tak, and gua (all of which would be glossed ‘I” in English), ellipsis (so-called ‘zero anaphora’), and even first-person reference by use of one’s own name. However, no systematic study of these forms has yet been undertaken in natural conversation. Rather, Indonesian pedagogical and reference grammars (cf. Wolff 1992, Alwi et al. 1993, Sneddon 1996, inter alia) claim that the choice of first-person reference is determined by unidimensional social variables such as formality level of the speech event, social intimacy among speakers, or personal characteristics of the speaker such as age or regional background. For instance, Sneddon (1996:160-161) characterizes aku as socially ‘intimate’ and saya as socially ‘neutral’, and (1996:163) classifies the first-person pronoun gua as ‘Jakartanese’, suggesting a regional motivation for its use.

While these observations may in fact reflect general trends in the use of these forms, the distribution appears to be far more complicated. In a corpus of spontaneous colloquial Indonesian conversation, I observe a single speaker referring to herself as saya, aku, tak, gua, and using her own name. If, as the above-cited grammars claim, the social variables of age, regional background, and social intimacy were the key determinants in the choice of first-person form, then one would not expect this range of variation within the speech of the same speaker among the same interlocutors in the same speech event.

Therefore, this paper seeks to provide a thorough, discourse-based analysis of the distribution of first-person reference forms in the colloquial Indonesian corpus. Addressing this issue requires an eclectic methodological approach, drawing on the research traditions of corpus linguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, and Conversation Analysis. I demonstrate that a number of factors are implicated, in addition to the traditional social variables. These include collocational frequency, the intersubjective maintenance of ‘footing’ and ‘stance’, and the sequential positioning of the utterance in the ongoing speech event. The results of this study reaffirm the necessity of recognizing the interdependence of language form and language use; rather than the traditional sociolinguistic view of formal variation simply being conditioned by external, a priori social variables, this study suggests that a speaker’s choices among linguistic forms (such as first-person reference in Indonesian) are, to a large extent, negotiated and arrived at in the process of interaction itself.

References

Alwi, Hasan, Soenjono Dardjowidjojo and Anton M. Moeliono (eds.) 1993. Tata bahasa baku Bahasa Indonesia, 2nd Ed. Jakarta: Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, Republik Indonesia.

Sneddon, James N. 1996. Indonesian: a comprehensive grammar. New York: Routledge.

Wolff, John U., Dede Oetomo and Daniel Fietkiewicz. 1992. Beginning Indonesian through self-instruction. Ithaca: Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program.