ascends to the text level and uses the criteria established at the word and phrase levels, what is often observed is a very simple formulaic propensity of the language to apply rules
recursively to produce a massive information structure that is well-ordered, principled, and both cognitively and aesthetically balanced. Thus, both encoding and decoding processes are
simple and intuitive. Burmese eschews the sort of grammatical apparatus for construal so typical of European grammars, such as agreement marking of dependents for person, number,
or gender, or case marking of argument roles. Rather than explicit marking of constituents, Burmese prefers constituents to be built-up in patterns based upon categoriality, particularly
that of nominals.
The focus of this study will be to discuss the nature of the grammatical units themselves and the nature of the relations among constituent wholes. First, the nature of basic
linguistic units of speech will be examined together with the rationale behind the analytic categories used by previous investigators of Burmese. It will be important to note that while
each previous analysis of Burmese grammar had its own purposes and audience, history and assumptions, it is not the aim of this study to judge those goals nor is it to judge the success or
failure of previous analyses to reach these specified goals. At the same time, it is not meet to attribute the goals of this study to those analyses. Rather, the aim here is to utilize the insights
from the observations and categorization schemas of past studies, where appropriate, and to incorporate these observations into new principles meant to provide a deeper understanding
of the Burmese language. These principles help to explain both the essential nature of the grammatical categories themselves and the patterns of word, phrase, clause, sentence, and
text. It is expected that the reader will gain an appreciation for the elegant economy of Burmese and the generative capacity of a system that applies repeated rules to yield vast
complexity. Furthermore, it is expected that the result of text analysis will have a payoff for attendant areas such as reading theory, particularly for those interested in promoting literacy
and other practical applications. Perhaps also other applications may arise in second-language teaching for larger patterns of text that are dense with information—for example, those
commonly found in expository text. It is also hoped that cross-linguistic applications such as the translation—including machine translation—of texts into Burmese or other related
languages may be better understood and implemented.
1.1 Components of Language Processing
A separable component of linguistic organization in Burmese, called here ontological,
2
is posited.This level of linguistic processing renders an underlying linguistic form that is
separable from grammatical and semantic processes. The basic organization of ontological form is perceptible via grammatical categorization, which is discussed extensively section
3.5, and through nominalization processes relating to word, sentence, text, and information structure. It is proposed that the separable components of linguistic processing produce
different types of nominals. Four component levels are proposed:
2
“Ontology is the theory of objects and their ties. The unfolding of ontology provides criteria for distinguishing
various types of objects concrete and abstract, existent and non-existent, real and ideal, independent and dependent and their ties relations, dependences and predication” Corazzon 2003. Such ontological objects
and ties correspond to conceptual things and relations here.
• The conceptual component or level of processing produces conceptual nominals
that correspond to conceptual things. •
The ontological level of processing produces ontological nominals which relate to form.
• The grammatical level of processing produces grammatical nominals which relate
to grammatical classes. •
The semantic component produces nominals that relate to lexical classes.
1.2 Essential Pattern—Juxtaposition
The basic principle of Burmese grammar is juxtaposition. The essential role of juxtaposition is to predicate. To understand how juxtaposition can be a type of predication, one must
examine the simplest example of it. The simplest of predications is the existential predication that specifies that something or other exists. The existential predication is the intransitive
predication that underlies each nominal. For example, the bare noun ‘cat’ used either referentially or non-referentially presupposes the existence of some thing referred to, either an
object or a conceptual category.
The other type of predication involved in juxtaposition is the equational predication that specifies that something is also something else. The equational predication is the
transitive form of this juxtaposed predication. The intransitive form could be represented as 1a and the transitive as 1b.
1 a. ‘A is.’ b. ‘A is B.’
Alternatively, what we find in many verb-final languages such as Burmese is that the equative or copular verb remains covert because the configurational pattern of juxtaposition
suffices to specify this type of predication. Characterizing the nominal elements in 1 as N, the following representation results
in the two predication types displayed in 2. 2 a. N
vkl
lu ‘person’
b. N
N
v
l taumif:
lu a-kaung: ‘a good person’
What is to be observed here is that in 2a there is a predication—that of existence of the element itself. This predication is inherent in all nominals and may optionally be overt in
the surface structure for pragmatic purposes. The 2b pattern of N + N juxtaposition forms the basis of Burmese textual relations
and the essential typology of subordinate, immediate constituent relations of compositional structures within the text, as will be discussed in later chapters. The equational nature of the
simple juxtaposed nominal pattern, while typical in many languages of the world Payne 1997:114, seems more common in verb-final languages where the semantically empty, final
copular verb is unnecessary for predication. This is particularly the case in Burmese since subject and object agreement is unmarked on the verb, and neither tense nor aspect nor
modality is an obligatory feature.
It is posited here that from the presence of a nominal element—any nominal element within the language—there is at the word level an underlying predication of existence of the
unit to which it refers. A word itself is more than a lifeless object. It has qualities of being and potentiality about it imposed by the observerspeaker of that word establishing a pragmatic
and cognitive dimension of ontological being, from which further “life” or “action,” motive or movement can be generated and posited linguistically. Being is attributable to nominal
elements not in and of themselves but in the action of naming or attributing the quality or nature of the object itself. Thus the ontological status is derived not from the object itself but
from the act conducted “behind the scene” of creating a conceptual object by the very act of naming it Husserl 1900:502; Searle 1969. The linguistic sense of being derives from the
relationship of the speaker to speech. The speaker creates linguistic objects and relations in an alternative symbolic world that bears some relationship to what the speaker wishes to
communicate. Within this symbolic world of the speaker’s creative intention and communicative purpose the process of object creation takes on a life of its own, standing as it
does apart from and separate from any other form of empirical reality. That is, the objects that are created linguistically do not exist necessarily in a one-to-one relation to some external,
“real world” object or relationship, though they may represent those relationships.
3
The pattern in Burmese of juxtaposed nominals, N + N, may have not only equational interpretations but also non-equational interpretations. The predication underlying the non-
equational form correlates to two structural types—compound noun N + N ‘picture book’ and modified noun phrase N + V ‘good man’ in Burmese. Both of these types of
constructions have more complex predicates than an explicit verbal predication.
4
3
Smith 1990:30 explicates Husserl as follows:
Husserl’s theory of language and of linguistic meaning is based on this theory of objectifying acts. Language is seen as having meaning only to the extent that there are acts in which meaning is bestowed upon specific expressions in
specific sorts of intentional experiences. Husserl argues that the acts which are capable of giving meaning to our uses of language must in every case be objectifying acts: the acts whose species are linguistic meanings are in every case
acts of “representation” or “object-fixing”. We can put this point in a more familiar terminology by saying that for Husserl all uses of language approximate to referential uses. More precisely: all expressions are associated either
with nominal acts – which are directed towards objects in the narrower sense – or with acts of judgment – which are directed towards states of affairs. … Husserl insists – in a way that will recall contemporary views of Frege, Russell
and Meinong – that even syncategorematic expressions like and, or, if, under are referential in their normal occurrences of use, in the sense that they, too, have their own objectual correlates. They correspond to certain merely
formal or abstract moments of complex structures of various kinds. Under, for example, is correlated with a certain spatial relation, and with a certain formal moment of combination.
4
Levi 1976 distinguishes nine semantic types for the semantics and word formation of N + N compounds, each of which is an underlying predicate, some with a sentence level sense of “case”: HAVE genitive ‘picture
book’; USE instrumental ‘gasoline engine’; LOC locative ‘Michigan winter’; FROM ablative ‘Florida orange juice’; FOR benefactive ‘ice tray’; BE existence ‘pine tree’; MAKE ‘honeybee’; CAUSE ‘tear gas’;
BE CAUSED BY ‘birth pains’. Such underlying predicates are not a part of compositional meaning as much as metaphorical paths in meaning construction.
3 a.
vl taumif:
lu a-kaung: N + N
‘a good manperson’ b.
vl aumif:
lu kaung:
N + V ‘good man’
c.
vl aumif: onf
lu kaung: sany [N + V] P
‘the man is good’ The complex predications of what appears to be such a simple form, N + N, can best
be understood in relation to the insights of cognitive linguistic studies, particularly the role of metaphor in structuring new meaning.
The contemporary development of cognitive linguistic theory is useful for understanding conceptual structuring of more complex predications than mere existence or
equation. Particularly significant are the insights of Leonard Talmy 2000a, 2000b with regard to the conceptual structure of events, and of Ronald Langacker 1987a, 1991b on the
cognitive nature of the grammatical categories of nouns and nominals. In particular, Langacker’s explanation of how the same conceptual reorganization occurs in a deverbal
noun as in the nominalized clause provides a consistent means of handling the types of nominalization dealt with in this study—grammatical morphological, clausal, phrasal,
sentence and ontological.
The cognitive process of constructing whole senses or whole scenes from smaller grammatical units, such as a noun phrase like ‘mother of invention’, or the role of organizing
larger spans of text around a metaphor has been demonstrated by Lakoff and his associates Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Lakoff 1987, Lakoff and Nuñez 2001 to belong to a
rational function of language and the brain based upon metaphorical structuring processes that seem to be hard-wired into perception itself. Extending Lakoff’s work on metaphor,
Fauconnier and Turner Fauconnier and Turner 1996, 2002; Fauconnier 1997; Turner 1996 have developed the analytical construct of metaphorical blending, also called conceptual
integration, to demonstrate how complex situational analogies and extended metaphors are mapped between domains and various types of senses of meaning to result in whole
integrated meaning.
The notions of metaphoric blending and conceptual integration are not only useful for understanding the relationship between the basic elements of thought which cognitive
linguists have been employing as heuristic primitives—image-schemas, frames, conceptual metaphors and metonymies, prototypes, mental spaces; they are also applicable to
grammatical constructions—phrases, clauses, parallel units, sentences, and so forth. Conceptual integration can be very useful to understand the new meaning relationships of a
newly created whole unit. This is the case with complex words, such as a compound noun of the form N + N, as in ‘picture book’, It is also the case with noun phrases whose meaning is
based upon metaphor, as in the abstract relation between head noun and modifier in a phrase such as ‘mother of invention’. The structured set of cultural objects and sets of relationships
from the areas of general cultural knowledge, or from the linguistic semantic setsdomains and from grammatical structures provide a framework within which innovative generation of
meaning occurs at a constructional level.
1.3 Conceptual Integration
