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.