kraung.
aomajumif.
, ra.ka:
|um:
‘because’. Although Taw Sein Ko proposed eight form classes, in his book he used as explanation basically three classes: Nouns with
Pronouns, Verbs, and Particles. This observation will prove helpful to the overall structure of the proposed nature of form classes and the eventual manner in which a reduced set of three
generic forms organize Burmese constituent structure.
3.4.3 Stewart
Stewart 1936; 1955 developed language course materials for Colloquial Burmese and taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He observed only three
parts of speech in Burmese—nouns, verbs, and particles 1955:10. Many of the early observations by Stewart agree with the approach of the present study.
There is no evidence that more than two classes of full words exist—nouns, including pronouns, and verbs. Besides these there are form words, either mere
particles or broken down full words which are used to show grammatical relation. It is no doubt true that we find nouns and verbs in subordinate uses, used, that is, to
express meanings which would be expressed in English by an adjective or an adverb, and that collocations of nouns and verbs are used to express the meanings of our
distributive adjectives or reflexive pronouns. Stewart 1936:1
Stewart’s work has served as a welcome influence for successive linguists to depart from Western analytical categories of grammar toward more natural, emic categories of word
forms. His influence was recognized on the next generation of Burmese grammarians, both in England and America.
3.4.4 Cornyn
Cornyn 1944, working in the United States during World War II, produced a grammar sketch of Colloquial Burmese as a doctoral dissertation in linguistics at Yale University. One
practical purpose of this grammar was to provide a linguistically informed analysis of Burmese for the American war effort, including second language structure acquisition.
Studying under Leonard Bloomfield, his approach is singularly structuralist and taxonomic. His astonishingly succinct analysis 34 pages attempts to accommodate the grammatical
structure of the language itself rather than to impose external linguistic categories. Cornyn divided the form class into two types: free and bound. He classified two types of what he
called the minimal free form words—either nouns or verbs. Bound forms included particles, proclitics, enclitics, and rhyming syllables.
Including bound form with the minimal free form, Cornyn differentiated the following types of nouns and verbs, which in other systems of grammar would be called phrases
1944:11: •
noun or verb plus particle:
DrSm
di-hma
4
‘here’ deictic pronoun + location particle;
5
oGm:wf
twa-de ‘goes’ verb ‘go’ + Sf,
• noun derived from verbs with a proclitic:
tvkyf
?a-lou? ‘work’ nominalizing
prefix + verb ‘work’;
wvGJ
talwe ‘wrong’ reduced syllable ‘one’ + verb ‘err’,
4
This representation is Cornyn’s transcription of spoken Burmese.
5
The parenthetical representation of form types is mine.
• verb with an enclitic:
vkyfwm
loutta ‘work’ verb ‘work’ + nominalizing particle,
• nouns formed by doubling, with or without a proclitic and rhyming syllables:
aumif:aumif:
kaun:gaun: ‘good’ verb ‘good’ + verb ‘good’ with voiced onset
in close juncture;
r\ynfhw\ynfh
mapyei tabyei ‘not quite full’ negative prefix m
ă-verb ‘full’ + reduced numeral one tă- verb ‘full’; kanlan ‘across’ verb
‘across’ with tone change to match following syllable + ‘road’;
eD wdwd
ni tidi ‘reddish’ verb ‘red’ + reduplicated rhyming syllable t-t- which copies vowel and
tone of the main verb, in close juncture to indicate diminished quality of the verb. The doubled verbs as well as doubled nouns are considered to be noun expressions
by Cornyn 1944:31.
It could be said that Cornyn’s treatment constituted a further advance toward emic categorization of Burmese word forms, shedding Western constructions deemed necessary for
the second language learner. His classifications also incorporated the concept of embeddings from other levels. The word-level forms listed above demonstrate a sense of the categoriality
of free forms as a superordinate category incorporating structural properties of both free and bound forms in various combinations. This level he labels Form. A similar breadth of
inclusion is demonstrated in his next level of category labeled Expression. Cornyn utilized a kind of tacit hierarchy without actually specifying or discussing how levels relate to each
other. This hierarchy has been inferred to have the form of figure 17.
Sentence Expression
Form
Figure 17. Cornyn’s 1944 grammatical hierarchy
The Expression unit includes compounds, phrases, and relative clauses—all units marked by postpositional particles that relate information to the wider sentence. The Sentence
unit has three types: narrative, imperative, and equational.
3.4.5 Forbes
