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Article published In:
Concentric
Vol. 45:1 (2019) ► pp.82–111

Lagi in Standard Malaysian Malay

Its meaning conceptualization

| National Chengchi University

Lagi, a less studied Malay adverb, has meanings such as ‘in addition’, ‘again’, ‘more’, and ‘yet/still’. We aimed to see how these meanings could be related in a single word and to find the conceptualization and grammatical paths involved. We also intended to find out whether this word carries any underlying meanings not specified in dictionaries. In the corpus, although many examples have lagi in the sentence-final position, some unconventional sentence-initial uses were also found in news headlines. We found that lagi serves a special function in news headlines, emphasizing the repeatedness of events that were often negative or undesirable. The seemingly unrelated meanings of lagi can be categorized based on three meaning concepts – addition/more meaning, less-more continuum, and temporal lagi (‘yet/still’, ‘again’). In addition to these concepts, we also found several possible grammaticalization paths that contribute to the different uses of lagi.

Keywords: Lagi , Standard Malaysian Malay, adverb, corpus
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. Lagi
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1 Lagi in idioms
    • 4.2 Lagi in the corpus
    • 4.3 Lagi in news articles
  • 5.Conceptualization of Lagi
    • 5.1 iterative > still
    • 5.2 return (‘to return’, ‘to go back (to)’) > iterative (Heine & Kuteva 2004: 259–260)
    • 5.3 remain > durative (Heine & Kuteva 2004: 254)
    • 5.4 comparative (+ negation) > no longer
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • List of abbreviations
  • Notes
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 31 May 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/consl.00004.chu
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