Many people-linguists or plain locutors of Indonesian and Malaysian-have the feeling that the functions and meanings of pun are clear and well known. This standpoint may have to be justified though. This article aims to provide an exhaustive analysis of pun, which could be useful for future textbooks. Paradoxically, Stevens & Schmidgall-Tellings’s bilingual dictionary (2004) gives a better analysis of pun than some grammars.ģThis work on pun was undertaken following the finding that pun was treated not only inadequately but incorrectly in existing textbooks. It is also the case with some modern ones, particularly the two official standard books Tata Bahasa Baku Bahasa Indonesia (1993) and Tatabahasa Dewan (2008). The oldest grammars (Werndly, Marsden, Favre, Ophuijsen, and even Fokker and Mees) say virtually nothing about pun. It transpires that the analysis of the functions and meanings of pun depends largely on the intuition and impressions of the various authors. But the result is a treatment that is insufficient or even neglectful and often misleading. Pun is only one particle in the system of Malaysian-Indonesian grammar and one understands that it cannot receive more than a summary treatment in handbooks. The differences between modern and classical Malay are not only of frequency but of function too. 1This article aims to analyse the functions and values of the particle pun in modern Indonesian and Malaysian, using quantitative evidence based on a corpus built for this purpose.ĢThe particle pun is much less used in modern language than it was in ancient literature.