Overt Expletives in Malay

This study investigates the presence of overt expletives (viz. pleonastic subjects) in the Malay language through a corpus analysis of newspaper articles archived by Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (2013). While previous research has explored the existence of null expletives in Malay via a theoretical approach, this study applies the theory and provides a focussed examination of constructions involving such expletives in actual language use in order to confirm the postulation of expletives in Malay. The methodology involves the identification of an overt non-referential nominal expression in the subject position of a small set of expletive constructions, e.g., raising, extraposition, and tough-constructions. It is found that, albeit scarce, overt expletives in the form of the 3rd person singular pronoun ia are used in the language, thus allowing us to confirm the presence of overt realisations of the null expletive postulated by scholars in theoretical studies of Malay. With concrete evidence of expletives in Malay, it is possible for linguists to model the language more accurately, not just allowing greater descriptive adequacy in theoretical syntax but also various applications in the field of linguistics, such as improved grammatical accuracy in machine translation and artificial intelligence.