Information structure in Sembiran Balinese

This paper discusses the information structure in Sembiran Balinese, an endangered, con-
servative mountain dialect of Balinese. It presents the first detailed description of the ways
topic, focus and frame setter in this language interact with each other and with other ele-
ments in grammar. It is demonstrated that Sembiran Balinese employs combined strategies
that exploit structural positions, morpho-lexical and syntactic resources in grammar. The
description is based on a well-defined set of categories of information structure using three
semantic-discourse/pragmatic features of [+/−salient], [+/−given] and [+/−contrast]. This
novel approach allows for the in-depth exploration of the information structure space in
Sembiran Balinese. The paper also highlights the empirical-theoretical contributions of the
findings in terms of the significance of local socio-cultural context, and the conception of
information structural prominence in grammatical theory.