A corpus-based analysis of Malay prefix <i>ber-</i>

Abstract The Malay ber- prefix has not been discussed as extensively as other Malay verb prefixes. It has been accorded fuzzy meanings, such as “to mean something taking place” and “to be able to combine with any base form.” Such vague definitions have hindered and prevented a thorough understanding of it. Our analysis took into consideration a middle voice marking system of situation types established by Kemmer ( 1993 , 1994 ) and refined the categories based on instances collected from a large annotated corpus, the Malaysian Malay News Corpus ( Chung &amp; Shih 2019 ). From the corpus, 262,210 instances of ber- were retrieved, analyzed and categorized into 14 distinct functions. The results revealed that 93.33% of the total word-tokens of ber- were middle markers, whereas the remaining 6.67% were non-middle markers. We also refined and added new categories not mentioned in the past (e.g., “State of Having root ,” and “Stative”). Some of the middle functions of ber- , especially the most cited and prototypical “Grooming/Body Care” function, were not the most frequently found functions. This indicated that ber- in Malay, as a middle marker in the form of reflexives in Malay, was not frequently found in the corpus.