The Role of Grammatical Particles as Predicators

flow of speech and specify how a particular chunk of meaning relates to other chunks of meaning.

1.5 The Role of Grammatical Particles as Predicators

Postpositional particles P are central to Burmese grammar. A sentence in Burmese typically consists of a number of preceding nominal adjuncts and a final verb. Each of these units is typically bounded by a postpositional particle that orients the nominal unit in relation to other units and designates its semantic role within the sentence. As mentioned earlier, Burmese does not have case, gender, agreement, or indexical role marking of nominal elements on the verb. Postpositional particles are often designators of conceptual space, much as English prepositions are prototypically spatial, and then extended for temporal or logical domains. The local subject is not prominent in Burmese and is often null. Westerners would say this is because it is understood from the context, either the textual context due to continuing topic reference or in the social context of expected reference. It is possible that the Burmese speaker would have no comment when asked to specify information structure of a particular sentence, as none is needed. He also may not understand the need of the Westerner to make up something that isn’t there. Resolution of topic ambiguity is more a Western problem and bringing up the issue to a Burmese speaker can result in loss of face because he may have no idea what and why the question is being asked. The notion of subject in Burmese is textual, not sentential. See section 5.3.2 Grammatical meaning resides in the postpositional particles. Thus the role of the particles and their individual functions have formed the bulk of many of the initial grammars of Burmese done by Western-influenced grammarians Judson 1866; Taw Sein Ko 1891; Stewart 1936, even though in many of the early studies the nature of word-form categories were cast in terms of a Western requirement for grammatical role and semantic clarity, e.g., adjective, adverb. The particle determines the sentential role of the operand it governs, whether nominal or verbal. In this analysis, the particle is the governor wherever that particle occurs, much as Principles and Parameters Syntax regards the determiner as governing the head of the determiner phrase. As will be seen in the course of the analysis here, the particle rules. Additionally each particle, whether governing a nominal or a verbal element, also establishes a relationship with that constituent. The type of relationship indicated by the particle may vary along the spectrum from the purely grammatical to the purely semantic. Strictly nominalizing particles appear to have little semantic function, whereas accompaniment particles are richer semantically, encoding different semantic roles and orienting more salient arguments of the sentence. Both types of particles however establish a relationship to the governed, and that relationship is, in the broadest term, predicational as a relation see table 2. For example, a locative particle prototypically situates its object somewhere in space. That situating is a predication in the underlying semantics. The role of locative rSm hma Loc in relation to D di ‘this’ in 7 is not only to designate a grammatical category. It also creates an object relationship with the operand by locating the deictic marker D di ‘this’ in significant social and linguistic space and a predicative relationship of spatial being or position ‘x is located’. 7 D rSm xdkif: yg di hma htuing: pa [[[ this Loc] sit ] Plt ] ‘Please sit down here’ The particle creates a nominal by virtue of the structure itself. Thus, the deictic marker ‘D di ‘this’ takes on nominal properties and this construction becomes more like ‘here’ than ‘this place’, although the latter is literally accurate in regard to its compositional sense. Ontologically, a nominal is formed from the deictic particle, a sense of a “thing,” that is this place called “here.” Semantically, using the conceptual blending model, the two juxtaposed parts of this particle phrase function as resources for the Input spaces of the semantic blend. A Burmese speaker would not segment the two, but conceives of the phrase as a whole unit of meaning, a blend. Thus, a nominal with its postposed particle, N + P, results in a type of ontological predication, here symbolized as N. The rule is N + P = N. Part of the rationale for this operation, discussed in more detail later, is that the Burmese indicative sentence-final particle sany onf provides a clue to the substantive function of predications as nominals, or ontological units, and to the role of all particles as secondary nominalizers. That is, particles orient or relate “something.” It is the “thingness” of the operand that is designated by the operation of the particle. It is akin to the process of naming something, thereby establishing its identity and uniqueness, designating it as “something” and giving to it a quality of existence. That quality of existence could be called “nominal existence,” that is, existence in name only, but it is that quality of “named existence” which is structurally represented in Burmese text and which has ontological structure—the structure of nominalization. Such a structure assists a Burmese speaker or listener in text processing because this structure maps out the metaphorical and mental space relations called information processing. The particle is said to perform secondary nominalization because a nominal type element is the by-product of the particle application. There are particles whose primary role is to bind overtly a nominal unit and then to link the whole nominal to another nominal. Such particles are recognized as explicit or active nominalizers. It is no accident that they are morphophonemic variants of the sentence-final particle sany onf see section 4.3.3. In Burmese, as a head-final language, the sentence-final particle is also the last structurally highest governing head of the entire sentence and, furthermore, is the operator on the entire sentence, its operand. However, the current analysis is not limited to the sentence; it examines the wider textual context. The final sentence particle also marks the adjunct role of the sentence to the whole paragraph or a larger textual section see section 5.2.4.2.2. Similarly, at the next hierarchical level, another particle marks the role of the paragraph-like section in the text as a whole. These types of discourse units are also nominals. The nature of the sentence and the expanded textual tree structure emerges as a repetition of simple patterns employing a simple set of rules regarding juxtaposition and particles see section 5.2.2 and also appendices D and E. These structures may consist of juxtaposed nominals or of a nominal with a verbal, both of which produce a conceptually blended nominal element. Additionally abstract nominal units are constituted by the role of postpositional particles. The resulting nominal element is a concept which Burmese grammar explicitly and sometimes implicitly treats as a noun or substantive. What is called NOMINALIZATION here is used more broadly than word-level derivational nominalization. It is also broader than nominalized clauses. It, of course, includes all of these and the process of word-level nominal compounding, but it is also the result of higher level, juxtaposed sentential units or adjuncts that, in combination, form conceptual blends of greater abstraction than the word or the sentence. Juxtaposed abstract nominal elements within the text are treated as the same pattern as found at the word level: a. [N + N = N] as a compound nominal, b. [N + N = predication of existence or equation], c. [N + V = predication = N] as all sentences are regarded as nominals at varying levels of abstractness, and d. [N + P = N] as predication of some positional relationship. The inventory of abstract structuring units can be minimal, only three types: nominal N, verbal V, and postpositional particles P. All units in combination create nominals, and all units in combination create predications, though of different types. Nominal juxtaposition imposes an equational interpretation ‘a race + offspring’ = ‘offspring that is of a certain race’ = ‘nationality’. Verbal juxtaposition directs the predication associated with the semantics of the verb, the normally expected type of predication. Particle juxtaposition creates a reduced type of statement about the relationship to the nominal ‘at’, ‘by’, ‘with’, and so forth. That postpositions are regarded as abstract predicates is not as unusual as it may seem at first. In a discussion of English prepositions, Becker and Arms 1969 noted that verbs can be substituted for certain classes of prepositions, e.g., instrumental ‘with’ and ‘use’ even though ‘with’ has “case role” properties. They detail other features of prepositions, such as motion, location, and cause, that are assigned to speech-act participants and argue that prepositions should be considered as a type of abstract predicate. Similarily, Bahasa Indonesia and Thai Stine 1968 are contrasted with English for the way in which particles function as verbal counterparts. While neither Becker and Arms nor I propose that adpositions, post- or pre-, are verbs, there is agreement that in Asian languages, and even in English, adpositions provide an alternate way of presenting very similar information as that in verbs. They also follow some of the same constraints such as object deletion, conjoining of prepositions both must be of the same type, i.e., locational or motional, and some correlations of path in the semantics of some motion verbs. This feature of verbs in relation to prepositions has been systematized and come to be informally known in cognitive linguistics as “Talmy’s law”—”that roots of motion verbs tend to co-encode, alongside the superconcept of motion itself, exactly one additional factor such as Path, Manner, Figure, Cause” Talmy 2000b:21–117. Certain language families tend to conflate different roles and then to leave the other roles for “satellite” constructions. These he calls “verb-frame” versus “satellite frame” languages. English tends to encode the Motion and co-event in a verb-frame form and to represent Path in an external satellite. 8 a. He went by plane to Dallas. b. He flew to Dallas The satellite constructions are the places for degraded verbs that have lost their main lexical function and been reduced to a more closed-class function similar to prepositional functions. While the origin of the postpositional particles in Burmese is not within the scope of this study, it may be noted that many of the postpositions have derived from verbs. An interesting future study would be to examine the various diachronic pathways of Burmese postpositions.

1.6 Nominal Constructions of Predications