Grammar and Inference in Conversation

This study analyzes 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 organization and the co-construction of meaning and structure by conversational interlocutors.

Ruben Stoel, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL), Leiden University, on Linguist List, Vol.17.2392 (2006):
This book is a welcome addition to the few linguistic studies on Javanese that have appeared in English. Ewing's book is more specifically concerned with Cirebon Javanese, and this appears to be the first publications in English on this dialect. The book is well written and easy to read, [...] There are numerous examples of every structure discussed. The book is light on theory and will therefore be accessible to a wide range of linguists.