IS KHMER A LANGUAGE WITH “DECORATIVE” MORPHOLOGY? (ON JOHN HAIMAN’S VISION OF KHMER).
Погибенко Тамара ГригорьевнаВЕСТНИК ИНСТИТУТА ВОСТОКОВЕДЕНИЯ РАН '2019, №2, с.256-267
This paper is an attempt to challenge prof. Haiman’s approach to analyzing the Khmer language data. More specifically, it argues against the attempt to depict Khmer as a language with a lot of referential junk and decorative morphology, violating the basic principle of packaging information clearly and economically. It is maintained that prof. Haiman’s conclusions are based on incorrect syntactic and semantic analysis which does not take into account diachronic evidence and comparative data. Evidence is provided to show that synonym lexical complexes can be a means of semantic derivation.