The Behaviours of the General Nasal /N/in Indonesian Active Prefixed Verbs

Abstract

This paper investigates how a general nasal /N/ in the morpheme of the active verb prefix /mǝN-/ in Indonesian behaves as it is combined with simple verb forms to produce the prefixed verbs. The data were mainly collected from an Indonesian standardized dictionary ‘Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia’ and analysed phonologically. The research reveals that the general nasal /N/ most assimilates to the initial sound of the simple verb into labial /m/, alveolar /n/, palatal /ɲ/, and velar /ŋ/, and is deleted if it is followed by approximant (w, y), central (l), or retroflex (r). In contrast, the general nasal /N/ can delete a voiceless stop consonant (p, t, k). Next, to generate the correct surface representations from the underlying representations can be done by applying nasal assimilation and deletion rules. The right rule ordering is the nasal assimilation rule should be applied prior to the deletion rule. Apart from the regularity, it is also found a small number of data which do not follow these rules.