Lokjan Batik from the north coast of Java
A major focus of my research over a prolonged period has been on Javanese, the largest regional language in Indonesia, and the third largest mother-tongue language in East Asia. I have been particularly interested in non-standard dialects. My earlier work in this area is on Cirebon, a marginal dialect of Javanese substantially different from Standard Javanese and spoken on the north coast of West Java. Currently Sander Adelaar and I hold an Australia Research Council Discovery Grant to investigate Javanese dialect variation more widely.
Relevant Books and Papers
Grammar and inference in conversation: identifying clause structure in spoken Javanese.
Ewing, Michael C. 2005. Grammar and inference in conversation: identifying clause structure in spoken Javanese. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Abstract:
- This study analyses how morphosyntactic structures and information flow characteristics are used by interlocutors in producing and understanding clauses in conversational Javanese, focusing on the Cirebon variety of the language. While some clauses display grammatical mechanisms used to code their structure explicitly and redundantly, many other clauses include few if any of these grammatical resources. These extremes mark a cline between the morphosyntactic and paratactic expression of clauses. The situation is thrown into relief by the frequency of unexpressed referents and conversationalists’ heavy reliance on shared experience and cultural knowledge. In all cases, pragmatic inference grounded in the interactional context is essential for establishing not only the discourse functions, but indeed also the very structure of clauses in conversational Javanese. This study contributes to our understanding of transitivity, emergent constituency, prosodic organisation and the co-construction of meaning and structure by conversational interlocutors.
Hierarchical constituency in conversational language: The case of Cirebon Javanese
Ewing, Michael C. 2005. “Hierarchical constituency in conversational language: The case of Cirebon Javanese.” In Studies in Language 29.1:89-112.
- Abstract:
- This study investigates the role of constituency in structuring clauses during spoken interaction. It examines transitive clauses in a corpus of conversational Javanese. Do clauses unfold in a flat structure as each element is produced in real-time, or is there evidence of a hierarchical structure among constituents? By looking at adjacency in the production of clausal elements, with prosody as the key to understanding how speakers organize linguistic elements into larger groups, evidence is found for the emergence of a verb phase structure within clauses of lower discourse transitivity, but a lack of hierarchical structure in clauses of higher discourse transitivity.
Two verbs of giving in Cirebon Javanese conversation
Ewing, Michael C. 2003. “Two verbs of giving in Cirebon Javanese conversation.” In Toshihide Nakayama, Tsuyoshi Ono, and Hongyin Tao, eds. Recent studies in empirical approaches to language, Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics 12, 3-21. Santa Barbara: UC Santa Barbara Department of Linguistics.
Reference and recovery in Cirebon Javanese conversation
Ewing, Michael C. 2001. “Reference and recovery in Cirebon Javanese conversation.” Australian Journal of Linguistics 21.1:25-47.
Two pathways to identifiability in Cirebon Javanese
Ewing, Michael C. 1995. “Two pathways to identifiability in Cirebon Javanese.” Berkeley Linguistics Society 21: special session on discourse in southeast Asian languages, 72-82.