The Ka- Passive Form in Balinese Nyoman Sujaya Warmadewa University, Bali, Indonesia Ketut Artawa Udayana University, Bali, Indonesia I Nyoman Kardana Warmadewa University, Bali, Indonesia Made Sri Satyawati Udayana University, Bali, Indonesia Abstract—This paper accounts for the ka- passive form in Balinese. It focuses on its syntactic and semantic representation. Using the data taken from Balinese narrative texts issued in the Bali Orti of Bali Post newspaper, and applying the RRG theory by Van Valin and Randy (1999), it was found out that the ka- passive belongs to a morphological passive voice of Balinese where the the voice is marked on the verb (it is marked by prefix ka-). The ka- base form can be attached by applicative suffixes such as -ang, -in, and –an. These morphological verbs imply various syntactic structure and semantic representation. Index Terms—prefix ka-, passive, syntactic and semantic analysis I. INTRODUCTION Balinese is one of the larger regional languages in the middle part of Indonesia. This language is spoken by around 3,247,283 speakers, about 77% of the population of Bali, which was recorded as 4.2 million. Balinese language is mainly spoken by Balinese people living in Bali and those living in other parts of Indonesia, like Lombok, and Sulawesi. Although Balinese is widely used in social interaction, especially in custom and cultural interaction, in practice the native speakers of Balinese often made errors in using their own language. This is possibly due to the influence of Indonesian, the national language, and the English language which nowadays is widely used in Bali for tourism businesses. This phenomenon possibly makes young Balinese more interested in using Indonesian and English rather than Balinese so that they are not fluent enough in using their own language, Balinese. In their daily life some Balinese are not good in using suffix -ang and -in. They used them interchangeably. They often say enjuh-in tambahe ‘hand over the hoe for ‘enjuh-ang tambahe ‘hand over the hoe’. It is like the error of using suffix -i and -kan in Indonesian. It is wrong to say Dia menyuguh-kan tamu itu dengan kue ‘She offered cakes to the guest’. The correct one is that the verb suguh ‘offer’ should be in the derivational form with suffix -i if it is directly followed by an animate object. Seeing the condition that the use of Balinese by young Balinese is decreasing, the government of Bali made an effort to preserve it through offering Balinese subject in the curriculum of the elementary, junior and senior high schools. The government also offered Balinese day on Wednesdays for every institution in Bali. In this case everybody is obliged to use Balinese when they communicate with each other. Not only that, the Balinese government also put Balinese teachers at every school in the countryside as the extension agent. In recent years, a number of linguists have done researches on syntax of Austronesian languages, including Balinese. Artawa (2013) wrote about the basic verb constructions of Balinese. In his study it was stated that Balinese has a number of peculiar properties. It has passive like properties in which the patient is the subject but the verb is unmarked. There is also a split of the third pronominal Agent in Low Balinese represented as an enclitic -a on the verb followed by an Agent adjunct represented by a prepositional phrase. Indrawati (2011) examined about Balinese serial verbs construction and found out that the Balinese serial verb constructions express a single macro-event that can be classified into two types: component SVC and narrative SVC. Syntactically, SVCs in Balinese are biclausal constructions, some are monoclausal, and some are successive clausal. Arka (1998) made a research on speech levels, social predicates and pragmatic structure in Balinese and found out that social information be treated in terms of social predicates and modeled using LFG-style parallel structures. The social predicates are contained in what is called pragmatic- structure (prag-str). It is demonstrated that this approach can account for the plain as well as the (dis) honouring use of linguistic forms in Balinese. Other works on Balinese related to grammar have also been discussed by some linguists like Kersten (1984) and Oka Grandoka et al. (1985). Another researcher, Suryati (1997) with the topic Balinese verbs that have complementation in Balinese, is about grammatical analysis on Balinese verbs. However, they have not discussed how the morphosyntax works on passive voice in Balinese that has several forms and implies various different constructions and meanings. They have not analyzed it in detail seen from syntactic and semantic viewpoint. ISSN 1798-4769 Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 886-894, July 2019 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/jltr.1004.29 © 2019 ACADEMY PUBLICATION