Madurese prolepsis and its implications for a typology of raising

This article focuses on the grammatical properties of a Madurese structure in which an argument of a complement clause appears to occur in a nonthematic position in its dominating clause. Raising-to-object (or its analogue in nonderivational theories) has been proposed over the past thirty years or so for the corresponding construction in the closely related Austronesian languages of Balinese, Indonesian/Malay, and Javanese. Close examination of the Madurese data reveals that a proleptic NP analysis, in which the matrix NP is generated in the matrix clause, proves superior to the raising analysis and shares virtually all of the same properties as the parallel English construction (I believe about Marlena that she left for Jakarta on Wednesday). Enumeration of these properties and comparison with both raising and copy raising provide the initial step in identifying the hallmarks of each construction and how they might differ typologically.