New meaning is created in the Blended Space where the resultant meaning is greater than the sum of its parts. Meaning here is not compositional meaning in the sense of Frege,
but constructional meaning, or metaphorical meaning that arises from the process itself. It is emergent meaning which has its own sense and components. The conclusion manifest in 4a
is not compositionally derivable from the sum of its parts, or from the subparts of its parts. The kind of meaning, which is called constructional here, contrasts with a compositional
approach to meaning in which the semantic attributes of an utterance necessarily follow from those of its elements.
Having sketched too briefly some general ideas about metaphor and meaning, we turn now to its role in Burmese.
1.3.1 The Role of Metaphor in Burmese Constructions
In an essay entitled “The elusive figures of Burmese grammar,” Alton Becker 1993 records much the same proclivity for metaphor as that proposed in this study, though more from an
anthropological-rhetorical-linguistic perspective. He takes into particular consideration the extremes of context, any one of which may indicate a separate meaning or sense. He lists at
least six types of context—the immediate words, the context of the language act, the context of memory, a specific belief system “about the ontology of that world,” the medium of the
utterance sound, writing, or thought, and the context of silence. In addition to context types, Becker recognizes two abstract functions of the extreme ends of the Burmese verb phrase.
The right pole demonstrates a propensity to signal aspects of the speech event, while the left pole of the verb phrase, the area of the verb proper, indicates the world of
NATURE
, or the world referred to in the content of the utterance. The right pole in contrast could then be
called
CULTURE
. Becker’s insights about the “world” a Burmese builds up, particularly the role of the poles in relation to information type, play a role in the present portrayal of
Burmese as successive levels of nominal units in a sentence and text. To demonstrate how very different Burmese is from languages such as English, and
how parsing and glossing is nearly impossible, Becker takes a 24-word utterance reproduced here in the same orthographic shape from a published Burmese text in colloquial style—“Let
that be…as soon as we arrived we bathed. After that we had a reception. That’s just what I wanted.”
… xm:ygawmhav …. tJgeJh a|mufa|mufcsif:a|csKd:? aemuf
rdwfqufyGJudk oGm:|wf? tJg tawmfbJ`
Becker 1993:63
Using the transliteration system adopted here, this brief text reads as follows. 5
hta: pa htau.
le ai: da nai. rauk rauk hkang: re
hkyui: rauk
put Plt Rev Att Dm-p Dm-d Acc arrive arrive Tm
water break after Let that be ….
with that matter arriving
after bathe
mit hcak pwai:
kui swa:
ra. tai ai: da a-tau bhai:
love connect party Ob go De NomRl Dm-p Dm-d sufficient Emp to the reception
we must go That’s really just right
Each element in this utterance is shown to have semantic, grammatical, and various other metaphorical senses which contribute to the whole, natural, clear meaning in Burmese.
“The whole thing can be seen as a string of metaphors” Becker 1993:68. What is often analyzed as either grammatical or lexical words are analyzed separately, each as metaphors in
their different contexts, the whole of which contributes to the metaphorical blend and the sense which a native speaker gains from the utterance as a whole.
For instance, the polite particle
yg
pa, which occurs near the end of the first clause,
xm: yg awmhav
hta: pa htau. le “Let that be …”, is often glossed as a grammatical
function and is so glossed in this study. It is actually a metaphorical use of an action verb that could be translated as ‘include’, ‘be with’, ‘accompany’. The act of including others is a
very important social act in a society where social harmony and saving of face are highly valued. The metaphorical use of the polite particle contrasts with its literal use as a physical
action of ‘including’ or ‘carrying along with’, particularly with an object. This physical sense itself has a productive extended use with humans or animate objects so that the sense
becomes ‘to be with’ or ‘together with’, ‘be present with’, ‘come with’. This physical sense is also highly social.
There are a number of conceptual blends at work here, but to reduce the complexity
somewhat, the use of pa as a politeness particle can be mapped as follows. The Input 1 mental space is one of general social relations; the scene of a visitor and host is most saliently
selected as one in which the strong cultural value of inclusion is demonstrated with a definite physical component implied—the specific bodily actions involved in attending to a visitor.
The Input 2 mental space is one of speaking with another person. Figure 4 demonstrates the cross-space mapping of the selective projection of two scenes blended into a speech act that
accomplishes the action of politeness by saying
yg
pa ‘include’. What comes from the Input 1
space of social actions are acts of inclusion that are regarded as indicating an attitude of politeness or respect. What comes from the Input 2 mental space of the speech act is the
action of speaking. Both the action and the attitude demonstrated by that action are in focus, not necessarily the attendant roles of the agent and the patient in the two scenes, although
they must be selected in the Generic Space to make sense of the metaphor of the action indicating a specific attitude.
Figure 4. Conceptual blend of the polite particle
The blend establishes the performative Austin 1962 of doing a politeness by saying it. Performatives as a class do not include the statement about which they perform. For
instance, a performative promise does not involve the statement that one is promising. Rather it is a separate act of a specific kind promising which is named by the performative verb.
The same is true with politeness
yg
pa; it is the act of being polite.
The placement of the performatives is toward the far right pole of the sentence in the area of the social situation, outside the content of the utterance in what could be called
Culture. The use of
yg
pa itself may not be felt as extremely polite in contemporary Burmese
society because it has become a threadbare metaphor. The opposite of inclusion is exclusion and this is strongly prohibited culturally. Importantly, absence of the polite particle does not
necessarily indicate impoliteness. There are other ways to indicate that The polite particle evokes Input 1 space of a scenario of host to a visitor and occurs as a grammaticalized verb in
a fairly fixed position in the verbal syntagma, the right pole, where it evokes the social context of the speech act. Situated in this position its scope is the whole sentence, not just the
immediately preceding verb. See numerous examples in appendices C and D. The metaphor of inclusion here is like a sweep of the hand to welcome one to come in and sit down. It is
very polite and overtly inclusive, just as most Myanmar people are.
A few words farther to the right into this verb phrase, is the particle
awm.
tau.
5
‘change of state’. Becker 1993 reports “It is used metaphorically of a verb that describes the act of hitting something into the air with hand, foot, or stick—as in the widespread Southeast
Asian game Burmese hkyang:loun:
csif:vkH:
in which the players, either singly or in a
5
Tones in transliterated Burmese are indicated with punctuation marks—creaky tone is the period mark, and breathy tone is the colon. See appendix A for a detailed description.
group, keep a rattan ball in the air with their feet.”
6
The contextual level to which
awm.
tau.
relates is the discourse itself as an “object.” It refers to the state of affairs of the preceding linguistic context but also to a projected world or scene in which the speaker of this text
changes the topic. Another way to translate this into English could be ‘Well, then…,’ where the ‘then’ signals a new state of affairs while the ‘well’ indicates a continuing state. The new
state in the imagined world comes into the blend as emergent meaning, which in Burmese has a bodily, felt sense of more abruptness, like the act of hitting or kicking something—
metaphorically speaking.
While the immediate glossing of Burmese words into English is quite possible, at least in a rough sense, as in 5, the expanded sense of a text as a whole is often untranslatable. It is
just this broad range of meaning that Becker attempts to enhance for his non-Burmese reader. One might say that the many “flavors” of Burmese words are in the multitude of scenarios
they engender.
Grammaticalization of Burmese verbs is a highly productive process, serving as the pathway for the development of postpositional particles, which are so important to the
Burmese sentence and textual organization. Particles serve as the grammatical counterpart of verbs in the structuring of information see section 4.3.2. The particles have evolved a more
background function and go unnoticed in comparison to prominent lexical forms of meaning. Without particles though, a text makes little sense and has little significance. These particles,
or grammaticalized verbs, intimate areas of meaning by metaphorically structuring the spatial, temporal, and logical relations with the range of semantic properties they still retain.
Postpositional particles serve as a background for a Burmese listener who needs pay only scant attention to the relations, images, or metaphors they evoke. These “closed-class
forms trigger cognitive operations that manipulate conceptual structures” Talmy 2000a:13. Postpositional particles serve as the skeleton of a text in relation to the lexical “flesh” of the
textual body, yet they often retain a part of their former lexical properties. In any one context, the portion that is retained or the sense that is taken is dependent upon the context for
selectional criteria that are activated in much the same way that conceptual integration relies on contextual relevance for the contents of the Generic Space.
A Burmese sentence unfolds like a landscape painting in words. Different types of synesthetic images arise via juxtaposition of simple words, something like Haiku poetry.
These may be visual images, of the scene, bodily actions, responses such as disgust or pity, smells, colors, moods, atmospheres, a bodily sense of ease or abruptness, as well as the
feelings of the speaker toward the text, or toward persons or issues within the text, the feelings and relationship of the speaker to the hearer or addressee, and so forth. These types
of cross-modal descriptive senses are more delicately and directly communicated by juxtaposed metaphors, which can be analyzed using the basic model of conceptual
integration. Some words may syntagmatically function as grammatical particles and paradigmatically function as metaphors amplifying the sense of the whole unit that they unite
or govern.
6
This pastime is similar to Hacky Sack in America and to footbag as a popular international sport.
1.3.2 Conceptual Integration and Framing
