Semantic structures of Balinese speech act verbs

Abstract

This article is aimed at discussing Balinese Speech Act Verbs from the semantic perspective. The data are oral and written ones, the former was collected by interview from the key informen from two regencies in Bali namely: Tabanan and Bangli regencies. The later, i.e written data were obtained by observation and note-taking, taken from four Balinese short stories. The collected data was analyzed by applying the Natural Semantic Metalanguage with further discussion seen from (i) mapping and together with (ii) explication. The result shows that there are a number of non-compositional polysemy implied by any lexicon in terms of Balinese Speech Acts. The non-compositional polysemies are including: say and say, say and know, say and feel, say and happen, and the last is say and do.