184
6 Conclusion
…this issue of paradigm choice can never be unequivocally settled by logic and experiment alone.
-Thomas Kuhn 1970:93
6.1 Summary
Nominalization is a dominant grammatical pattern within Burmese, and is manifest at multiple levels from word, phrase, clause, sentence, and paragraph, and even extending to the
discourse as a whole. Three types of nominalization were hypothesized: semantic nominalization, grammatical nominalization, and ontological nominalization. This study
views the role of nominalization in Burmese cognitively as an information structuring mechanism for text. The logical argument structure of Burmese text unfolds through a
process which creates linguistic, reified objects and iteratively embeds them within other linguistic objects. The nesting patterns of nominalization across clauses are of different
grammatical, semantic, and ontological types.
Ontological objects—created via a grammatical system of nominalization functioning at multiple levels—serve to cross-index cognitive chunks of information operating according
to the specific text type structure. Information structure in Burmese conforms iconically to the notions of “scene” and “action” within a scene, much as a drama might be staged with
different types of stage sets with characters performing their expected roles.
Progression of the discourse events usually mirrors expected action sequences of body movement and interaction with other props, animate or inanimate, in a type of natural,
expectational “script.” Ontological objects created in linguistic space usually conform iconically to the speech situation. This progression is clearer for narrative genre, which
demonstrates a more active event line than expository genres thematic line.
Sentence structure and text structure mirror each other, both reflecting a propensity for a left-pole of textual content with reference to objects within the text. The right-pole
emphasizes the speech situation, pragmatic actions and attitudes of the speaker. Narrative and Expository text differ, according to this limited study, by the use of
transitivity strengthening particles—
u
ka. and
udk
kui—to indicate Figure and grammatical
nominalization and
onf
sany to establish Ground relations in the immediate sentence and
the text span. The difference in transitivity relations is manifest in different information structure—Narrative being Figure-Ground and Expository being Ground-Figure.
Interestingly, the two particles
u
ka. and
onf
sany are thought to be reflexes of proto-
Tibeto-Burman ergative and absolutive markers Lehman 1985. Ontological nominalization consistently structures as a left-branching tree from word,
to sentence, to text with regular right-headed constructions of Word, Expression, and Sentence.
6.2 Roles of Nominalization
