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.
