Semantic Roles of Batak Toba Emotion Verbs: A Role and Reference Grammar Perspective
Keywords:
Batak Toba language; emotion verbs; semantic roles; Role and Reference Grammar; Austronesian linguistics; thematic relationsAbstract
This study investigates the semantic roles of emotion verbs in Batak Toba, an Austronesian language spoken in North Sumatra, Indonesia, from a Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) perspective. Drawing on a lexical dataset of 100 emotion verbs categorized across six primary emotion domains — happiness, sadness, fear, shame, anger, and love/admiration — the study analyzes how thematic relations such as Actor, Undergoer, Experiencer, Stimulus, and Theme are encoded in emotion verb constructions. The data reveal that Batak Toba emotion verbs exhibit a rich system of semantic role assignment shaped by cultural values, bodily experience, and the concept of roha (the seat of emotion). The analysis employs RRG's Logical Structure (LS) representation to account for the predicate-argument structure of emotion predicates. Results show that most Batak Toba emotion verbs follow an Experiencer-Stimulus configuration, with a significant number also encoding Actor-initiated affective states. Additionally, morphological derivational patterns (such as pa-, mar-, and tar- prefixes) systematically modify the semantic role configurations of base emotion verbs. This study contributes to the documentation of Batak Toba as an endangered language and provides cross-linguistic insight into the semantics of emotion across Austronesian languages.
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