Chhany Sak-Humphry 1996 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background of the Language Modem Khmer or Cambodian is the official language used in Kampuchea or Cambodia. According to Judith Jacob (1960:351; 1965:143),Modem Khmer is considered to extend from about AD 1800to the present. Khmer is a member of the Mon-Khmer subgroup of the Austroasiatic family of languages. Khmer is spoken by people who live in Cambodia and by sizable communities who live in the Mekong Delta area of southern Vietnam, and in northern Thailand. In the last twenty years, the majority of Khmer speakers outside of the country are in America, France and Australia. Khmer language has a long literary tradition of 1,500 years. Native Khmer words are monosyllabic or disyllabic. Words ofIndic origin tend to be polysyllabic. The Cambodian language has been subjected to the influence of Sanskrit, Pali, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, French and English, just to name a few. Most of the colloquial speech relies on native Mon-Khmer words, but any elevation in style or discussion on topics of a political, cultural, economic or environmental nature and technological words bring in many words borrowed from Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, French, and more recently English. The majority of Cambodians are monolingual; however, in the last twenty ---~ Chhany Sak-Humphry 1996
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Chhany Sak-Humphry 1996 1
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Language
Modem Khmer or Cambodian is the official language used in Kampuchea or
Cambodia. According to Judith Jacob (1960:351; 1965:143),Modem Khmer is
considered to extend from about AD 1800to the present. Khmer is a member of the
Mon-Khmer subgroup of the Austroasiatic family of languages. Khmer is spoken by
people who live in Cambodia and by sizable communities who live in the Mekong Delta
area of southern Vietnam, and in northern Thailand. In the last twenty years, the majority
of Khmer speakers outside of the country are in America, France and Australia.
Khmer language has a long literary tradition of 1,500years. Native Khmer words
are monosyllabic or disyllabic. Words ofIndic origin tend to be polysyllabic. The
Cambodian language has been subjected to the influence of Sanskrit, Pali, Thai,
Vietnamese, Chinese, French and English, just to name a few. Most of the colloquial
speech relies on native Mon-Khmer words, but any elevation in style or discussion on
topics of a political, cultural, economic or environmental nature and technological words
bring in many words borrowed from Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, French, and more recently
English. The majority of Cambodians are monolingual; however, in the last twenty
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Chhany Sak-Humphry 1996 2
years, many of the Khmer population bordering Thailand, Laos and Vietnam have
become bilingual. Since the 1993Cambodian election, French and English are the
dominant foreign languages in the city for the educated, but in local Khmer life, Thai,
Chinese and Vietnamese have an advantage over the other two. The Khmer language,
like its country, is in a state of shock with rapid changes.
1.2 Previous Analyses
Very limited linguistic research has been done on Khmer phonology, morphology,
semantics, and grammar, especially in the area of syntax.
I will briefly present a general overview of the previous works on Khmer
grammar.
Maspero's work (1915) Grammaire de la Langue Khmere was one of the earliest.
It is based on the traditional European grammar approach which relies on semantics to
establish word classes. In addition, much of the vocabulary and style are no longer in
common use.
Gorgoniev's work (in Russian) is unavailable, thus I am unable to make any
comparative analysis.
From the point of view of generative grammar, the structuralist analyses by
linguists such as of Huffman (1967) An Outline of Cambodian Grammar, Noss (1966)
Cambodian Basic Course, Jacob (1968) Introduction to Cambodian, and Ehrman (1972)
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Contemporary Cambodian: GrammaticalSketch are inadequate in the following
respects:
(1) They focus mostly on morphology and are not explicit. Thus they cannot be
objectively tested;
(2) Most are pedagogical materials for language teaching and learning rather
than systematic descriptions of the structures of the language; and
(3) They are in some ways too narrow and specific in the sense that they provide
only prose statements about the individual patterns observed in a particular corpus. They
achieve only language-internal generalizations, and since they are not designed to be
consistent with any general linguistic theory, they have no cross-linguistic implications.
In addition these works on syntax are inadequate in the following ways:
(1) There is no comprehensive detailed analysis of the internal structure of
phrases and clauses;
(2) No language-internalor cross-linguistic predictions were made and none
could therefore be tested; and
(3) Most importantly, none of them has done a comprehensive analysis of
modem Khmer nouns and noun phrases.
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1.3 Goals and Objectives of the Study
The scope of this dissertation will be limited to the subcategorization of nouns and
their dependency relationships to their regents and dependents (attributes). The purpose
of this study is fourfold:
(1) To do a complete Lexicase dependency grammar analysis of the grammatical
characteristics of nouns and noun phrases in Modem Khmer;
(2) To test the theory by determining to what extent the grammatical properties
of Khmer can be described and explained within this formal and explicit theory, and to
identify any areas in which the data prove to be incompatible with the claims made by the
theory, thereby possibly necessitating a modification of the theory itself;
(3) To re-evaluate and redefine the definition of pronouns and their
characteristics in relation to their regents and dependents; and
(4) To take and justify positions on controversial questions such as the status of
classifiers, number words, and 'adjectives', the distinction between relator nouns and
prepositions, and the structure of the indirect relative clause and indirect possessive
constructions.
The following is the outline of the dissertation:
Chapter 1, apart from specifying the goals and objectives of this study, presents
information on previous work in Khmer grammar, a brief conception of lexicase
dependency grammar, the source of the data and the Khmer orthographic representation.
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Chapter 2 gives an overview of Khmer clause-level structures, including the basic
patterns of verbal and verbless sentences, conjoined sentences, and prepositional phrase
constructions in Khmer.
Chapter 3 focuses on the grammatical classification of Khmer nouns and the
classification ofNP structures.
Chapter 4 presents an analysis of the anaphoric noun qaa.
Chapter 5 investigates the syntactic distribution of Khmer pronouns and revises
the generallexicase definition of pronouns.
Chapter 6 presents a justification of the claim that classifiers are nouns and not
adjectives, and describes their relationship with their noun regents.
Chapter 7 presents an investigation of the extension noun class, which includes
the relative noun daael and the non-relative noun kaar.
Chapter 8 discusses the syntacticproperties of locational relator nouns and their
distributions, and of the non-Iocationalrelator noun rbah2.
Chapter 9 examines the justification that number words are nouns. In addition it
will show their dependency relationships with other constituents.
Chapter 10 examines the identification of non-number nouns or independent
nouns which are location nouns and ordinary nouns in Khmer.
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Chapter 11 describes multiple dependent constructions and the relationship among
possessive, locative, equative and prepositional phrases when occurring as dependents of
a single head noun.
Chapter 12presents a summary of conclusions and will point out some
generalizations, some contributions of this study to the lexicase model, remaining