follows a brief summary presentation of the basic principles of grammatical organization for ontological nominalization and a discussion of the constructional forms of Word, Expression
and Sentence.
3.5 Present Approach to Word Categories and Nominalization
The approach to word categories adopted here is presented in the following sections, first regarding basic word forms and the cognitive basis for these categories. Then the discussion
of adjectives and adverbs demonstrates that both forms are nominals within the pattern of the complex word. A discussion of types of particles follows.
3.5.1 Basic Form Categories
The lexical word in Burmese is regarded as a unitary type of grammatical form with two members, Noun and Verb. The cognitive semantic primitives underlying these two members
are those of prototypical “Thing” and prototypical “Relation.” Distributionally, a third form class is posited for Particle. The function of the Particle form class could as well have been
abstracted to Relation, and while this is the preferred analysis, nevertheless for the sake of connecting to previous grammatical analyses of Burmese and in order to limit the risk of
misunderstanding, I preserve the notion of three categories of word-level forms—Noun, Verb, and Particle—and do not conflate Verb and Particle, as shown in table 18.
Cognitive Class Thing
Relation Ontological and
Grammatical Forms Noun Verb
Particle Table 18. Burmese abstract word level form classes
As there are two cognitive types of Words: Thing and Relation; there are also two levels of Words distinguished in Burmese. There are basic words, in contrast to derived
words, following the traditional distinction between inflection and derivation. In the latter some operation switches the form class.
The Relation that is a Verb is a lexical verb, whereas the Particle is a type of grammatical verb. The Verb functions both externally from Thing to higher levels and
internally from itself to Thing in its construction. There are two classes of verbs: stative and dynamic. Many verbs fall somewhere along a continuum from stative to dynamic—highly
active verbs involving kinetic contact and a path of motion. The role of transitivity as a property of verbs is minimal, being a by-product of sentence construction. Transitivity is
indicated by explicit postpositional particles of source and goal on nominal sentential arguments, whose inclusion signals a trajectory of motion or tension between the poles, or by
other verbs with meanings such as ‘put’ or ‘hit’ whose scope of predication is higher than the “main” verb. Transitivity is also a feature of text structure in Burmese see section 5.3.1
Hopper and Thompson 1980; DeLancey 1987.
Burmese has been characterized as ambitransitive Matisoff 1976 since the nature and behavior of verbs does not conform to typical transitivity systems. For instance,
prototypical transitive verbs such as ‘hit’ or ‘kill’ in Burmese may be used in such a way that
there is nothing distinctive about the verb itself that syntactically requires specific nominals or “case role marking” different from proto-typical intransitive verbs such as ‘sleep’ or
‘remain’. Neither highly active, kinetic verbs nor highly inactive, non-contact verbs require overt manifestation of sentential subject or object nominals. In fact, it is rather common for
subjects to be null after the first mention in a text until a significant discourse juncture. Objects may be null as well. The verb and what has been called the verb phrase are the
somewhat more “obligatory” parts of a clause, but as we shall see the Burmese sentence or utterance need not have a verb, nor little else that one could call a completed final clause.
That apparent sentence fragments can be grammatical supports the notion of higher order nominals in an abstract nominal template, or an ontological structure.
The Particle in Burmese functions on multiple levels in the grammatical hierarchy. It relates constituents context-sensitively from phrase to text. It also functions internally to the
unit of which it is the head. In my analysis one of the most important external functions of the Particle is to create “Things,” reified textual objects, that is, nominalization. Okell and Allott
2001 describe the grammatical functions of hundreds of Burmese particles at local levels word, phrase, clause, sentence. While these unique functions inform this analysis, it is not
specifically the concern here to specify the semantic and grammatical functions of individual particles.
The Verb function is constrained to a more local relationship, internal to the construction of which it is a constituent. The Verb, together with the Particle, is regarded as a
basic-level category within the Relation prototype. The principle distinction between the two kinds of Relations are that the open class Verb
a is registered as a main entry in the mental lexicon, b can fill the main verb position of a clause,
c combines to form lexical compounds of various types, and d predicates in the classical sense.
The closed class Particle a is not found in the mental lexicon,
b is normally dependent upon the presence of an open class form or rarely another Particle, and
c predicates as a grammatical operator. The Verb category can be sub-classified into types such as stative, active, motion, process and
so forth, all of which may be useful for delimiting co-occurrence restrictions and specifying semantic content, but for the purposes of this study the generic Verb will be all that is
necessary to demonstrate the basic framework of Burmese grammatical organization and text structure.
Noun is the grammatical category manifesting the prototypical cognitive category of Thing. Semantically, Thing may be the most basic and underived semantic component, not
derived by external grammatical processes. That is, there are certain words in Burmese that are recognized as Things apart from how they are used in larger constructions. The first
example of these would be physical objects
vl
lu ‘person’,
tdrf:
im: ‘house’,
vf
lai
‘paddy field’,
pmtkyf
ca up ‘book’, pronouns
ol
su ‘he’,
OD:
u: ‘Uncle’,
