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Lecture | Descriptive Linguistics Seminars

Minimalism in Malay Verbal Art: towards a cognitive poetic approach of allusion in Malay

Date
Friday 11 October 2024
Time
Series
Descriptive Linguistics Seminars
Location
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden
Room
1.18

Abstract

Notwithstanding the fact that they are expressions of language use, linguistic research on oral traditions in insular Southeast Asia is still in its infancy. Being categorised usually as verbal art, they are considered as a purely literary or anthropological enterprise for areal culture specialists. Together with the – mainly Dutch folkloristic – perception that they are either too “simple” or “boring” to have anything interesting for a linguist, this may explain the underrepresentation of linguistic research on the oral traditions of Malay and Indonesian.

A distinctive feature of Malay language use is the “indirectness as a rule of speech” (Asmah 1995). Pantun are small four-line poems and are generally acknowledged as the most salient instance of verbal art in Malay daily speech. In its long tradition of literary study, the semantic link between the first two and last two lines has been a point of disagreement between scholars (Braginsky 2004: 495).

In 1996 Palmer proposed a new culture-based linguistics in which he acknowledged main importance to metaphor research. This was first done by Goddard in 2004 whose ethnopragmatic analysis of Malay metaphor in pantuns confirms Asmah´s (1995) observation. In this presentation I want to take this analysis a step further by applying mental space theory (Fauconnier 2018). The purpose of this exercise is to show how cognitive poetics can be used to explain strategies of allusion in Malay.

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