Southeast Asia as a Linguistic Area

2006

The languages belonging to the families of Mon-Khmer, Tai, Sinitic, Hmong-Mien, and Chamic (Malayo-Polynesian) spoken in mainland Southeast Asia share a considerable number of properties due to contact-induced convergence. General characteristics of the languages in this area are the lack of obligatory grammatical categories and the central role of pragmatics (indeterminateness), syllabic morphology, and relatively flexible correlations between word class and syntactic positions (versatility). The following properties will be described in some more detail: word order, numeral classifiers, cooccurrence patterns of the verb with coverbs, tense-aspect-modality markers and directional verbs, an…