Bakat Passive in Balinese and Kena Passive in Indonesian: A Comparative Study

Abstract : This study investigates the grammatical properties of analytic passive constructions in two languages: the bakat passive in Balinese and the kena passive in Indonesian. Although Indonesian kena passive has received substantial attention in prior work, the Balinese bakat passive remains largely underexamined. This research provides the first detailed description and analysis of bakat passive, addressing a significant gap in Balinese grammatical research. For kena passive, despite the availability of basic descriptions, recent studies of comparable constructions in languages such as Mandarin and Vietnamese underscore the need for a renewed analytical perspective. Incorporating these insights, this study proposes an updated analysis of Indonesian kena passive aligned with the depth and rigor of current cross-linguistic research. The study primarily employs elicitation, involving regular sessions with native speakers to obtain grammaticality judgments, semantic interpretations, and other linguistic data. Additional evidence from Balinese and Indonesian corpora is used to test and refine the proposed hypotheses. The findings show that bakat passive and kena passive function as auxiliary verbs marking noncanonical passive constructions. Both encode “non-intentional” meaning through specific combinations with verbal roots of corresponding lemmas. They can also co-occur with canonical passive markers -a in Balinese and di- in Indonesian. These results advance our understanding of passive structure and syntactic organization in natural language.