Experiencer Construction in Indonesian

Authors

  • Zikriani Linguistics, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Sumatera Utara, Medan, Indonesia
  • Mulyadi Linguistics, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Sumatera Utara, Medan, Indonesia
  • Muhammad Yusuf Linguistics, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Sumatera Utara, Medan, Indonesia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24256/ideas.v14i1.8784

Keywords:

Experiencer Construction, Indonesian Syntax, Psychological Verbs, Argument Structure, Corpus Linguistics.

Abstract

This study examines the morphosyntactic realization of experiencer constructions in Indonesian using corpus-based data. A qualitative analysis was conducted on 500 clauses collected from the Indonesian CQPweb corpus and spoken data from YouTube. Applying distributional analysis and the X-Bar framework, the study investigates how experiencers and stimuli are structurally encoded across different verb classes. The findings reveal three major construction types: experiencer as subject, experiencer as object, and datival experiencer. These constructions systematically correlate with psychological verb classes and display variation in argument realization. Indonesian encodes experiencer roles through syntactic position and prepositional marking rather than morphological case. This research provides the first systematic corpus-based account of Indonesian experiencer constructions and contributes to broader discussions on argument structure and semantic role mapping in Austronesian languages.

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Published

2026-06-16

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