Kata penghubung dalam bahasa Melayu: persoalan linguistik dan gaya

Abstract

A complex sentence is one in which two or more clauses are joined together with conjunctions. In Malay, independent clauses are usually joined by coordinating conjunctions, such as kemudian, while depen-dent clauses are joined by subordinating conjunctions, such as serta. However, it is found that the description of Malay conjunctions is not well discussed by the grammarians, especially in terms of their status and functions. Hence, the purpose of this article, that is to describe and discuss the functions of conjunctions and how these functions re-late to their usage and style in Malay literary text. Specifically, the article will show how conjunctions are used to add some information of act and non act in complex sentences in these sources. In other words, linguistic discussions of occurrences of these conjunctions are based on real examples as used by a Malay writer. These provide va-lidity in relating the linguistic descriptions with the real usage and style of conjunctions in the language. The discussions will contribute to the field of Malay linguistics in terms of the status and conjunctions in Malay.