The description of the di– passive construction in dialectal Javanese

Abstract

Corpus of the non-standard Kudus Dialect of Javanese (JDK) passive voice construction was constructed in the course of fieldwork in Kudus and was annotated for several syntactic/semantic features. An investigation was undertaken into the di– affix in the JDK which encodes the passive function as compared to the Standard Javanese in a quantitative descriptive analysis. The results indicate the existence of an abbreviated agentive passive which occurs more frequently than the agentive passive; but less frequently than the agentless passive. The results also show that the passives of JDK are in fact likely to have inanimate subjects and have only animate demoted agent. However, human demoted agents appear more frequently than animal agents. Also, there is a tendency that the unmarked passive is most likely to be used as an agentless passive. The results suggest that the less colloquial the genre, the less likely the unmarked passive is to occur.