Madurese and Javanese as Strict Word-Order Languages

Abstract

Although much of the published literature on Madurese and Javanese characterize them as having fairly strict SVO order, the colloquial languages allow major constituents of a clause to occur in almost any order, a point Uhlenbeck ( I 975) makes quite clear in his study of Javanese word orders. Based on this relative freedom of word order, Uhlenbeck concludes that the basic unit of syntactic analysis for Javanese clauses should be the sentence segment rather than the phrase structure constitutents of transformational theories. Here it is argued on the basis of dislocation structures, a restriction on the specificity of subjects, and a restriction on word order in questions, that, in fact, the freedom of word order in Madurese and Javanese is only apparent and that many word orders diverging from the basic SVO are a result of dislocation structures. This analysis thus challenges the conclusion that phrase structure representations are inappropriate or uninsightful for these languages.