Search results for "Coverb"
showing 2 items of 2 documents
Problems with primary vs. secondary grammaticalization: the case of East and mainland Southeast Asian languages
2015
Abstract The present paper aims at testing four criteria for the distinction between primary vs. secondary grammaticalization in East and mainland Southeast Asian languages. These languages are of special interest for research on grammaticalization because they show limitations in the coevolution of meaning and form and because pragmatic inference is very prominent (lack of obligatory grammatical markers, multifunctionality). If the four criteria work in these languages, this can be taken as a good indicator for their cross-linguistic, maybe universal relevance. The criteria are tested with three markers that stand for three different types of multifunctionality: (i) the Khmer verb baːn ‘co…
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…