Information Structure of the Utterances Spoken by Children with Mental Retardation: A Case Study on Ansyah
- DOI
- 10.2991/soshec-18.2018.6How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- language patterns, information structure, children with mental retardation
- Abstract
Children with mental retardation (CMR) have the language characteristic of using inappropriate language rules, incomplete, simple, and short constructions, and a lot of deletions. To be able to grasp the meaning of the CMR speech, some additional situational information is needed. This study aims to reveal the phenomenon of information structure patterns found in the CMR’s spoken utterances. The data used were taken from the utterances spoken by a child with mental retardation obtained through an observation method with a recording and an elicitation technique. The results show that Subject in CMR’s speech often has the function as the Topic. In this case, Topic is not the same as Subject (SUBJ) because Topic is a pragmatic relation, while Subject is a grammatical relation. As old information, Topic in a sentence is often wiped out. Topic sometimes becomes an internal part of a sentence and sometimes it is outside the internal structure of sentences. Both variants were found in CMR's speech. The formation of the discourse functions, such as Topic, Focus, and Background Information (BI) in a sentence causes a different pattern of information structure (i-str). The variations of i-str patterns found in CMR's speech are (1) Topic + Focus, (2) Topics + Focus + BI, and (3) Focus only. Of the three patterns it appears that Focus is always present in the sentence because without Focus the sentence becomes less informative. In contrast, Topic and BI may be present or absent in a sentences
- Copyright
- © 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Mulyono Mr. AU - Agus Subiyanto AU - Prima Vidya Asteria PY - 2018/07 DA - 2018/07 TI - Information Structure of the Utterances Spoken by Children with Mental Retardation: A Case Study on Ansyah BT - Proceedings of the 2nd Social Sciences, Humanities and Education Conference: Establishing Identities through Language, Culture, and Education (SOSHEC 2018) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 26 EP - 30 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/soshec-18.2018.6 DO - 10.2991/soshec-18.2018.6 ID - Mr.2018/07 ER -