The Emergence of the Unmarked in Standard Malay Partial Reduplication

This paper analyses the process of partial reduplication in standard Malay. It has widely been claimed by previous Malay scholars that partial reduplication is a process of copying the initial syllable of the base. This paper argues that copying the initial syllable of the base is not actually how the reduplicative morpheme is copied. Based on the previous data from Farid (1980), Asmah (1981) and Zaharani (2000), this paper claims that partial reduplication is a process of copying the first onset in the initial syllable of the base, while the vowel is a reduced vowel [ə], whatever the vowel of the base is. Thus, the size of the reduplicative morpheme is a light syllable. The reduced vowel [ə] and the CV reduplicative morpheme emerge in SM partial reduplication can be accounted for by proposing the idea of the emergence of the unmarked, which is developed within Optimality theory (Prince Smolensky, 1993).