The Atypicality of Predicates with Two Explicit Arguments in Indonesian Conversation

While transitive clauses with a subject and object have long been a fundamental focus of grammatical analyses across languages of the world, more recently, it has become apparent that naturally occurring language-in-use is in fact overwhelmingly intransitive and transitive clauses with two arguments have a relatively low frequency. In this study, I examine conversational Indonesian and focus on one construction type, a transitive predicate with two explicit core arguments. This grammatical configuration is considered atypical due to its very low frequency in conversational interaction. The goal of the study is to begin to understand when and why expressions of this type appear. It is found that these atypical configurations regularly occur at points where there is a change in footing, including changes in topic, participation framework, or referentiality. It is further shown that the contrast between explicit and unexpressed arguments in Indonesian conversational grammar contributes to the reasons why predicates elaborated with two arguments tend to appear when there is a change in footing.