This paper attempts to study the interface between grammatical relations and grammatical categories (parts of speech) in Malay by presenting data from Ambonese and Indonesian. What is crucial in the study of grammatical relations in Malay is the 'iconicity principle' coded by affixes. For the present purpose, the prefix meN- will be accounted for in distinguishing the categories adjectives and intransitive verbs.

The discussion of meN- leads this paper into another attempt to explain why in some cases, the prefix occurs but in others it does not. The explanation is sought by exploring the agentive status of subject, which may be placed somewhere in a least-to-most-agentive continuum.

This paper also discusses the nature of 'argument-drop' in Malay by arguing that the pragmatic statuses of arguments set a condition for the deletion of the arguments in a clause.