Lagi in Standard Malaysian Malay: Its Meaning Conceptualization

Abstract

Lagi, a less studied Malay adverb, has meanings such as ‘in addition’, ‘again’, ‘more’, and ‘yet/still’. We aimed to see how these meanings could be related in a single word and to find the conceptualization and grammatical paths involved. We also intended to find out whether this word carries any underlying meanings not specified in dictionaries. In the corpus, although many examples have lagi in the sentence-final position, some unconventional sentence-initial uses were also found in news headlines. We found that lagi serves a special function in news headlines, emphasizing the repeatedness of events that were often negative or undesirable. The seemingly unrelated meanings of lagi can be categorized based on three meaning concepts – addition/more meaning, less-more continuum, and temporal lagi (‘yet/still’, ‘again’). In addition to these concepts, we also found several possible grammaticalization paths that contribute to the different uses of lagi.