Evidence for the emergence of new bound morphemes in Indonesian

Abstract

In the last three and a half decades the form of Indonesian found in the mainstream
print media has undergone significant changes. In 2001 I completed a longitudinal
study of these changes using a 5% random selection of twenty registers of a broad
cross-section of mainstream Indonesian newspapers and magazines from each of the
years 1966 and 1996. The lexical selection was done principally using the
lexicographic principles of Burchfield (1983) and Svensén (1993) in the context of
Hudson’s (1998) definition of ‘standard language’. A database was created that
recorded and classified each item in terms of nine variables. Amongst the findings
there is clear evidence of the adoption into the prestige form of Indonesian found in the
print media of at least eight English bound morphemes which have been adopted as
new productive prefixes. They are anti, eks, ekstra, makro, mikro, non, super and ultra.
The evidence for their having become productive, rather than their just being part of
words adopted by the process of direct borrowing, is their combination with Indonesian
morphemes to create new words.