Reference and Recovery in Cirebon Javanese

Abstract

This paper discusses referential forms in Cirebon Javanese conversation, including full lexical nominals and their information flow marking, personal and demonstrative pronouns, and unexpressed arguments. Less explicit forms are generally used for more accessible referents, as expected from crosslinguistic studies. Unlike Standard Central Javanese and other Western Austronesian languages, Cirebon Javanese has a fairly attenuated and generalized system of bound pronominal forms. Referents can be introduced and tracked with unexpressed arguments; these are the most common means of tracking referents through conversational interaction. Information flow pragmatics are important in the process of recovering the referents of unexpressed arguments: highly accessible referents are the ones that are most commonly unexpressed, creating chains which link items into discourse units. Overt syntactic linking through chains of unexpressed subjects is not found and information beyond the pragmatic and grammatical is needed for referent recovery, including semantic, interpersonal and cultural knowledge.