Typology of Subordination Clauses in Indonesian and Toba Batak

The study of typology of subordination systems across the world’s languages goal is to uncover the mechanisms underlying the association between the morphosyntactic structures used to code subordination and the conceptual situations they express. Morphosyntactic criteria are of limited applicability in cross-linguistic comparison, because not all languages display the same morphosyntactic structures. The term syntactic gap in Indonesian often refers to a structural limitation where certain sentence elements like a main clause are expected but missing, especially when using subordinating conjunctions like bahwa ("that") or karena ("because"). Peter Cole and Gabriella Hermon’s work on Toba Batak shows the subordination in Toba Batak is constrained by pivot alignment. Discourse-functional understanding of grammatical categories and linguistic structure reaffirms the need to understand linguistic structure as language-particular and diverse, and emphasizes the centrality of studying linguistic categories based on their actual occurrence in natural discourse.