Статьи

IS KHMER A LANGUAGE WITH “DECORATIVE” MORPHOLOGY? (ON JOHN HAIMAN’S VISION OF KHMER).

Вестник ИВ 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.