Chhany Sak-Humphry 1996 - Welcome to Khmer Language Study

Chhany Sak-Humphry 1996 1

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Language

Modem Khmer or Cambodian is the official language used in Kampuchea or

Cambodia. According to Judith Jacob (1960:351; 1965:143),Modem Khmer is

considered to extend from about AD 1800to the present. Khmer is a member of the

Mon-Khmer subgroup of the Austroasiatic family of languages. Khmer is spoken by

people who live in Cambodia and by sizable communities who live in the Mekong Delta

area of southern Vietnam, and in northern Thailand. In the last twenty years, the majority

of Khmer speakers outside of the country are in America, France and Australia.

Khmer language has a long literary tradition of 1,500years. Native Khmer words

are monosyllabic or disyllabic. Words ofIndic origin tend to be polysyllabic. The

Cambodian language has been subjected to the influence of Sanskrit, Pali, Thai,

Vietnamese, Chinese, French and English, just to name a few. Most of the colloquial

speech relies on native Mon-Khmer words, but any elevation in style or discussion on

topics of a political, cultural, economic or environmental nature and technological words

bring in many words borrowed from Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, French, and more recently

English. The majority of Cambodians are monolingual; however, in the last twenty

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years, many of the Khmer population bordering Thailand, Laos and Vietnam have

become bilingual. Since the 1993Cambodian election, French and English are the

dominant foreign languages in the city for the educated, but in local Khmer life, Thai,

Chinese and Vietnamese have an advantage over the other two. The Khmer language,

like its country, is in a state of shock with rapid changes.

1.2 Previous Analyses

Very limited linguistic research has been done on Khmer phonology, morphology,

semantics, and grammar, especially in the area of syntax.

I will briefly present a general overview of the previous works on Khmer

grammar.

Maspero's work (1915) Grammaire de la Langue Khmere was one of the earliest.

It is based on the traditional European grammar approach which relies on semantics to

establish word classes. In addition, much of the vocabulary and style are no longer in

common use.

Gorgoniev's work (in Russian) is unavailable, thus I am unable to make any

comparative analysis.

From the point of view of generative grammar, the structuralist analyses by

linguists such as of Huffman (1967) An Outline of Cambodian Grammar, Noss (1966)

Cambodian Basic Course, Jacob (1968) Introduction to Cambodian, and Ehrman (1972)

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Contemporary Cambodian: GrammaticalSketch are inadequate in the following

respects:

(1) They focus mostly on morphology and are not explicit. Thus they cannot be

objectively tested;

(2) Most are pedagogical materials for language teaching and learning rather

than systematic descriptions of the structures of the language; and

(3) They are in some ways too narrow and specific in the sense that they provide

only prose statements about the individual patterns observed in a particular corpus. They

achieve only language-internal generalizations, and since they are not designed to be

consistent with any general linguistic theory, they have no cross-linguistic implications.

In addition these works on syntax are inadequate in the following ways:

(1) There is no comprehensive detailed analysis of the internal structure of

phrases and clauses;

(2) No language-internalor cross-linguistic predictions were made and none

could therefore be tested; and

(3) Most importantly, none of them has done a comprehensive analysis of

modem Khmer nouns and noun phrases.

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Chhany Sak-Humphry 1996

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1.3 Goals and Objectives of the Study

The scope of this dissertation will be limited to the subcategorization of nouns and

their dependency relationships to their regents and dependents (attributes). The purpose

of this study is fourfold:

(1) To do a complete Lexicase dependency grammar analysis of the grammatical

characteristics of nouns and noun phrases in Modem Khmer;

(2) To test the theory by determining to what extent the grammatical properties

of Khmer can be described and explained within this formal and explicit theory, and to

identify any areas in which the data prove to be incompatible with the claims made by the

theory, thereby possibly necessitating a modification of the theory itself;

(3) To re-evaluate and redefine the definition of pronouns and their

characteristics in relation to their regents and dependents; and

(4) To take and justify positions on controversial questions such as the status of

classifiers, number words, and 'adjectives', the distinction between relator nouns and

prepositions, and the structure of the indirect relative clause and indirect possessive

constructions.

The following is the outline of the dissertation:

Chapter 1, apart from specifying the goals and objectives of this study, presents

information on previous work in Khmer grammar, a brief conception of lexicase

dependency grammar, the source of the data and the Khmer orthographic representation.

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Chapter 2 gives an overview of Khmer clause-level structures, including the basic

patterns of verbal and verbless sentences, conjoined sentences, and prepositional phrase

constructions in Khmer.

Chapter 3 focuses on the grammatical classification of Khmer nouns and the

classification ofNP structures.

Chapter 4 presents an analysis of the anaphoric noun qaa.

Chapter 5 investigates the syntactic distribution of Khmer pronouns and revises

the generallexicase definition of pronouns.

Chapter 6 presents a justification of the claim that classifiers are nouns and not

adjectives, and describes their relationship with their noun regents.

Chapter 7 presents an investigation of the extension noun class, which includes

the relative noun daael and the non-relative noun kaar.

Chapter 8 discusses the syntacticproperties of locational relator nouns and their

distributions, and of the non-Iocationalrelator noun rbah2.

Chapter 9 examines the justification that number words are nouns. In addition it

will show their dependency relationships with other constituents.

Chapter 10 examines the identification of non-number nouns or independent

nouns which are location nouns and ordinary nouns in Khmer.

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Chapter 11 describes multiple dependent constructions and the relationship among

possessive, locative, equative and prepositional phrases when occurring as dependents of

a single head noun.

Chapter 12presents a summary of conclusions and will point out some

generalizations, some contributions of this study to the lexicase model, remaining

problems, and suggestions for further study.

1.4 Theoretical Framework: Lexicase Dependency Grammar

This investigation is formulated within the lexicase dependency grammar

framework. Lexicase dependency grammar was developed by Professor Stanley Starosta

in the early 1970s at the University of Hawaii. Lexicase is a highly constrained grammar

of words, with no deep structure, no transformations, and no phrase structure rules. It is

generative, that is, it is explicit and formalized. A lexicase grammar is a set of

generalizations about the internal compositions, external distributions, and lexical

interrelationships of the words in a language (Starosta 1988:2). This theory attempts to

capture cross-linguistic generalizations, and thus makes claims about human language in

general.

A grammar consists of the lexicon which contains words and a set of

generalizations about the lexicon. Each word in the lexicon is marked for the classes of

words which can be dependent on it. A sentence is any sequence of words such that

every word is linked to one of the other words in accordance with features specified on

the two words. The syntactic information about the sequential and hierarchical

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characteristics of words in phrases, clauses and sentences is marked by contextual

features marked on the lexical heads of construction. Thus, the lexical entry of each word

will include contextual features which specify the subordinate attributive words with

which it may occur (Starosta 1988:56).

The lexicon contains only actually occurring words. All terminal nodes are words

and every word in a grammar is a member of one and only one of a restricted set of the

following syntactic word classes: noun (N), verb (V), adjective (Adj), adverb (Adv),

determiner (Det), preposition (P), conjunction (Cnjc) and sentence particle (Sprt)

(Starosta 1988:27).

The following section presents a brief definition of the basic lexicase dependency

concepts. A comprehensive discussion ofthe theory can be found in The Case For

Lexicase: An Outline of Lexicase Grammatical Theory (Starosta 1988).

1.4.1 Syntactic Dependency Relationship

Dependency is a relationship between two words, a regent and a dependent. A

regent is lexically marked for the kinds of features it allows or requires on its dependents.

A dependent is marked for features that are required or allowed by its regent; see stemma

representation of example 1.

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1.4.2 Features

Features represent the properties of each lexical item, and generalizations are

expressed about relationships among sets of features (Starosta 1988:52). There are two

basic types of features: contextual (e.g., 1[+Nom], 1[+AGT)) and non-contextual features

(e.g., [+V], [+N], [+pmn], [+lctn)); see stemma representation of example 1.

Contextual features specify the grammatical relationships between the regents and

their sister dependents in terms of immediate dependency (the relationship between a

head and its sister dependent) and linear precedence (the linear ordering relationship

between the regent and one or more dependents).

1.4.3 Case Forms and Case Relations

Case markers are grammatical devices which realize the case forms and signal the

presence of case relations.

'Case form' refers to lexical features that are assigned to or appear on the matrices

of nouns and prepositions (e.g., [+Nom] nominative, [+Acc]accusative, [+lctn] location).

Case forms are universal in scope but their realization varies from language to language.

Case relations in lexicase are universally limited to five: Patient (PAT), Agent

(AGT), Correspondent (COR), Locus (LOC), and Means (MNS). Case relations are

syntactic-semantic relations obtaining between non-predicate nouns and their regents.

The predicate clause has a predicate word [+prdc]as the head of a clause.

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1.4.4 Endocentric Constructions vs. Exocentric Constructions

In lexicase, an endocentric construction has only one obligatory word and zero or

more dependents (e.g., rfi::Jnis the regent of khflom, nfl) and n~w2)' An exocentric

construction has more than one obligatory word (a lexical head and one or more

dependent words). There are two kinds of exocentric constructions: prepositional phrases

and coordinate constructions. In example 1, n~w/ hawaii forms an exocentric

prepositional phrase where n~w2and hawaii are both heads of their own phrases. The

coordinate conjunction has the conjunction nfg as the head and the nouns phii::Jsaa

khmeeT and phii::Jsaa lii::Jwas its dependents.

1.4.5 Complements and Adjuncts

A complement is a constituent which is required by its regent verb (e.g., khflom,

phii::Jsaa khmeer and phii::Jsaa lii::Jware complements of the verb rfi::Jn)and must have a

fixed position. An adjunct is optional to the construction (e.g., the prepositional phrase

n~w2 hawaii is allowed but not required by the verb rfi::Jn)and may have no fixed

position (e.g., n~w2 hawaii khflom rfi::Jnphii::Jsaa khmeer nfg phii::Jsaa lii::JW). Nouns

can have complements and adjuncts too.

I In this dissertation there are two homophonous forms of n:iwj and n:iw2' The word n:iw2 has a

syntactic function as a preposition and n:fwj has a syntactic function as a verb. However for simplicity to

the readers n:iwj is also referred to as n:iw.

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Chhany Sak-Humphry 1996 1. khJ1om

1rii~n

study

phii~saa lii~w n~w2Lao language locate'I study Khmer and Lao in Hawaii.'

phii~saa khmeerKhmer language

hawaiiHawaii

1.4.6 Lexicase Dependency Stemma Representation

1.4.7 Interpretation of the Diagram

phii~saa lii~wSndex+N

6<7[+N]

n~w26ndex+P+lctn7[+N]

The transitive verb rfj{}D[+V, +trns] is the main verb of the sentence (the

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nygand

hawaii7ndex+N

+prpr

distribution of this word is marked by its indexing), and functions as the head of the

construction. Its contextual features I([+ND, I[+Nom], I[+AGT], 4([+ND, 4[+Acc],

4[+PAT], 6([+PD, 6([+lctn D, and 6([+LOCD, imply that the transitive verb rfj{}Drequires

a Nominative Agent (Nom-AGT), an Accusative Patient (Acc-PAT) and an optional or

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riin2ndex .

khJ1om +V nygIndex +trns 4ndex+N I([+ND phiisaa khmeer +Cnjc+pmn I[+Nom] 3ndex 3[+N]

I [+AGT] +N S[+N]4([+ND 4>3[+N]4[+Acc] 4<S[+N]4[+PAT]6([+PD6([ +lctn D

6([+LOCD2>1[+Nom]2<4[+Acc]2<6[+lctn]

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adjunct locational prepositional phrase. The 2>1[+Nom],2<4[+Acc], 2<6[+lctn] imply

that the verb rikm has the [+Nom] noun khflom placed before it, the [+Acc] nouns

following it, and the preposition location n§w2at the sixth index. The conjunction nftJ

[4ndex] is the head of the exocentric coordinate construction which has nouns phii:1saa

khmet:r andphii:1saaJji:1wasits dependents. This word nftJ is interpreted as bearing the

category features of its immediate dependents. The details of this convention have not

yet been formalized in lexicase dependency grammar. The exocentric prepositional

phrase n§w2 hawaiihas the preposition n§w2as its head and the noun hawaii as its

dependent. The preposition n§w2 [6ndex] bears the location feature [+lctn] and has the

contextual feature [7[+N]]marking hawaii as its obligatory dependent. The prepositional

phrase as a whole carries the locus LOC case relation and the location [+1ctn]case form.

1.5 Data and Orthography

1.5.1 Data

The data used in this investigation, Khmer sentences, have been constructed by

the author, a native speaker of Khmer. These sentences were cross-checked with other

Khmer speakers in order to identify any idiosyncraticproperties that do not generalize for

the language as a whole. They are based on my intuition, and reflect colloquial speech

rather than formal or descriptive language. To accommodate a wide audience, the

examples are written in phonemic transcription (Jenner and Pou 1980-81). Each word is

glossed in English and then a free translation is given for the sentence as a whole.

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1.5.2 Orthographic Representation

Modem Khmer uses a script which consists of 33 basic consonant symbols and 12

independent vowel symbols. In addition there are 16vowel symbols and 31 (subscript)

consonant symbols which can be used only in combination with the various basic

symbols. Khmer has 10 diacritical marks which are used to modify the sounds of the

independent and dependent symbols.

Each Khmer consonant symbol carries an inherent vowel sound. These consonant

sounds are either aa qakkhoosak'voiceless', or aakhoosak'voiced' and form two series

of consonants called the high register and the low register. The 16 vowel symbols may

have different pronunciations depending on whether they are used with aa or aa series

consonants. The 'voiceless' consonants are pronounced with the inherent aavowel and

the 'voiced' consonants are pronounced with the inherent aavowel.

The following table gives the Khmer script forms in their alphabetical order

together with their phonemic transcriptions.

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Chhany Sak-Humphry 1996 Table 1.1 Khmer Consonants, Monophthongs and Diphthongs

DIPHTHONGS

Complex

Long

Broken

Long and High

Short and mid

aac, aa~, aao

ii~, li~, yY~, yY~, uu~, ilU~

e~, o~

13

CONSONANT PHONEMESbilabial dental palatal velar glottal

Voiceless stops p t c k q

Voiced implosive stops b d

Nasal resonants m n J1 g

Voiced liquids r 1

Voiceless spirants s h

Semivowels w J

MONOPHTHONGS

Front Nonfront Back RoundedUnrounded Unrounded

long short long short long short

High 11 1 yY yY y y uu u

LowerhighHighermid ee eMeanmid ee e 60 00 6 0

Lower mid cc :):) :)

Low aa a aa a

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Chhany Sak-Humphry 1996 Table 1.2 Phonemic Transcription of Khmer Consonants

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TRANSCRIPTION OF MODERN KHMER

Consonant SymbolsKhmer Phonemic Khmer Phonemic

Transcription Transcription

Ii k- -k u b- [6] + V,,

I) kh- -kh -p,

Ii k- -k p + C,,

m kh- -kh 11 ph-, -p,

i1 1] n p-, -p

(j c- -c Ii ph-, -p,

iJ ch-, -c y m

£j c- -c 111 J-, -J,

Jill ch-, -c i r- -r,

ill p ill 1- -1,

tI d [d]-,-t t w- -w,

t1 th-, -t fU s- -h,

(I t- -t m h- -h, '

OJ th-, -t ij I-

nIl n it q-, -q

Ii d-t- +V,

- t

t- + C,

£j th- -t,

1/ t- -t,

ti th-, -t

S n

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Table 1.3 Phonemic Transcription of Khmer Vowels

Vowel SymbolsKhmer Phonemic Transcription

Syllabic Conjunct High Register Low Register

---~

HHH1Hli'f

-

:>:>

u-u:)1m

e:) - 0:)

1

-ih.

i'fJ

-

-

y-yhyYu

.

\1

~ vuu

"-if:

~~

uu:)

;):)

-;)h

yY:)

Ii:)

yyBUi1

rY

ryY

ly

lyYee

-eh

££

-£h

;)j

60

-6h

i

i:

i1 i

i

nn:i1 ;)W

-urn

-urn

-o:)m

-e:)I]

-e:)h

n5

~J.

.1

111

:

-J

-<7

- - ~ -- - ---

11

-11:)-- -yy:)-

-i:)-- -y:)-

-uu:)- - -u:)-

00

aaaa~-~h

ee + F

~:)j

Y-yhyY0

00 + FoowUU:)

aa:)

-a:)h

yY:)

Ii:)

-

-

-

-

ee

-eh

aa£

-aeh

aJ

aao

-aoh

aw-om-om-am

-aIJ-ah

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Chhany Sak-Humphry 1996 - Welcome to Khmer Language Study