Bahasa Indonesia: A window on parameters

Bahasa Indonesian (BI) presents an interesting puzzle for researchers who posit a single parameter to distinguish Western Malayo-Polynesian languages like Malagasy and Tagalog (M/T) from European languages like English, French, German and Italian (E/F/G/I). BI shares some properties with the M/T, others with E/F/G/I, and other properties seem to vary between the two language types. This paper proposes that there is a single parameter that distinguishes M/T from E/F/G/I. BI, however, chooses different values of the parameter depending on the syntactic domain. The VP domain has the E/F/G/I value of the parameter, the CP domain has the M/T value of the parameter, while the IP domain varies between the two settings.