The following four claims constitute a challenge for an attempt to arrive at a unitary syntactic function of -kan. First, in the 'buy'-type of verbs, -kan licences a single argument (instead of two), but either the Patient or the Benefactive NP is equally a possible candidate, depending on the context. Second, the lexical semantics of the verb may determine the choice of roles (Recipient, Benefactive, Locative, or Instrumental), but verbs with the same lexical semantics may have more than one role, which opens for syntactic ambiguity. Third, the causative constructions may be syntactically ambiguous either to the Benefactive or Instrumenal. Finally, the paper is an attempt to provide an explanation for the impossibility for the Patient NP to be primary object in constructions with the Instrumental -kan. This paper is an outgrowth of Kaswanti Purwo (1995, 1997).

References

Kaswanti Purwo, Bambang. 1995. "The Two Prototypes of Ditransitive Verbs: The Indonesian Evidence". Werner Abraham, Talmy Givon, and Sandra A. Thompson (eds). Discourse Grammar and Typology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
-----. 1997. "The Direct-Object in Bitransitive Clauses in Indonesian". Talmy Givon (ed.) Grammatical Relations: A Functional Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.