Foregrounding Marking Shift in Sundanese Written Narrative Segments

This monograph reports a dissertation research on
how a long-term linguistic contact affects discourse
information marking of narrative segments. It
particularly looks at the surface patterns and
underlying linguistic principles used to describe
the foregrounding events in traditional and modern
short stories, written in Indonesian (the official
language of Indonesia) and Sundanese (the native
language of West Java Province). Indonesian and
Sundanese have been in an intensive contact since

1945. The cross-linguistic data show how some 60-
      year of interaction between these two languages
      appears to have impacted on how Sundanese depicts
      foregrounding events in the modern texts. This newly
      adopted strategy suggests a gradual shift from
      particle to active-voice markings. Such a structural
      shift suggests not only the use of a new unmarked
      word-order pattern, but also motivates changes in
      pragmatic relations among the constituents of the
      marking patterns as well as the structuring of given-
      new information.

      Autorentext
      Rama Munajat is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics and a bilingual speaker of Sundanese and Indonesian. He has worked as an L2/FL instructor of English and Indonesian, teacher trainer, and curriculum and course materials developer both in Indonesia and USA. His interests include discourse analysis, L2 acquisition, and sociolinguistics.

      Klappentext
      This monograph reports a dissertation research on how a long-term linguistic contact affects discourse information marking of narrative segments. It particularly looks at the surface patterns and underlying linguistic principles used to describe the foregrounding events in traditional and modern short stories, written in Indonesian (the official language of Indonesia) and Sundanese (the native language of West Java Province). Indonesian and Sundanese have been in an intensive contact since 1945. The cross-linguistic data show how some 60- year of interaction between these two languages appears to have impacted on how Sundanese depicts foregrounding events in the modern texts. This newly adopted strategy suggests a gradual shift from particle to active-voice markings. Such a structural shift suggests not only the use of a new unmarked word-order pattern, but also motivates changes in pragmatic relations among the constituents of the marking patterns as well as the structuring of given- new information.