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Yaegan Doran On Sundanese Nominal Groups

Sundanese nominal groups: A textual grammar

Yaegan Doran

The Australian Catholic University

This talk considers the nominal group in Sundanese, a Malayo-Polynesian language of West Java, Indonesia. In particular, it builds a meaning-based description of Sundanese nominal groups, focusing in particular on textual meaning. Born of educational concerns associated with literacy programs, this talk describes the nominal group not only in terms of the formal syntagms at play, but also their functions; not only the paradigmatic choices that are available, but how they are taken up in text; and not only the grammar by itself, but how it realises meanings in discourse. The aim is to develop a richly co-textualised and metafunctional description of Sundanese nominal groups that can explain text patterns from a range of genres and registers.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, this paper did not discuss the textual meaning of the nominal group. Instead, it was concerned with reference, which is not a system of the nominal group, though the nominal group, along with the adverbial group, is a grammatical domain in which reference items are located.

One reason why reference is not a system of the nominal group is that it is not realised by a structural relation within the nominal group. Instead, reference is realised by a non-structural relation between a reference item and a referent which may not even be in the text (exophoric reference), let alone in the same nominal group.

This confusion was compounded by the fact that Doran used Martin's model of reference (identification), though without acknowledging the fact, which is (purportedly) discourse semantics, not grammar. Moreover, as explained in great detail here, Martin's model mistakes nominal groups for reference items, mistakes ideational denotation for textual reference, mistakes interpersonal deixis for textual reference, and mistakes non-reference ("presenting reference") for reference.

Ellipsis And Textual Prominence

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 635):

Ellipsis marks the textual status of continuous information within a certain grammatical structure. At the same time, the non-ellipsed elements of that structure are given the status of being contrastive in the environment of continuous information. Ellipsis thus assigns differential prominence to the elements of a structure: 

if they are non-prominent (continuous), they are ellipsed; 

if they are prominent (contrastive), they are present. 

The absence of elements through ellipsis is an iconic realisation of lack of prominence.

Deixis Vs Reference

Personal and demonstrative DEIXIS is a system of the nominal group, personal and demonstrative REFERENCE is not a system of the nominal group.

Personal and demonstrative DEIXIS serves an interpersonal function, personal and demonstrative REFERENCE serves a textual function.

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 367):

Many languages embody these two forms of deixis in the structure of the nominal group. The two are closely related, both being (as indicated by the term ‘deixis’) a form of orientation by reference to the speaker – or more accurately, to the ‘speaker-now’; the temporal-modal complex that constitutes the point of reference of the speech event.

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 623):

The textual status at issue in the system of reference is that of identifiability: does the speaker judge that a given element can be recovered or identified by the listener at the relevant point in the discourse or not? If it is presented as identifiable, then the listener will have to recover the identity from somewhere else. If it is presented as non-identifiable, then the listener will have to establish it as a new element of meaning in the interpretation of the text.

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Criteria For Distinguishing Process Types

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 354):