Tagging a corpus of Malay texts, and coping with ‘syntactic drift’

The structure of Malay presents the corpus linguist with an extremely interesting problem. At high syntactic levels, the language is familiar enough, and one can talk of direct objects in transitive constructions, and even of agentless passives. The dominant sentence order is SVO. Parsing at this level is therefore relatively straightforward. The problem is at lower levels, where Malay patterns quite differently from Indo-European languages. If the linguist tries to process Malay using categories and techniques designed for Indo-European, then it comes across as at best confusing and at worst in a state of chaos. Malay is neither confusing nor in chaos; but it does need to be analysed using techniques which are sensitive to its own patterns.