The morphological implications of two polysemous formatives in Khmer

The morphological implications of two polysemous formatives in Khmer

The morphological implications of two polysemous formatives in Khmer

Stephen Self GIAL

Three of these ‘semi-prefixes’ are completely productive synchronically and derive from full lexical

native Khmer words Of these, two are used to derive abstract nouns from verbs: kaː ‘business, work’ and

səckdəj ‘signification’ (Gorgoniev 1966:55; Haiman 2011:47–8) The third, neak ‘person’, is used to

derive agentive-type nominals corresponding more or less to English nouns in -er (Gorgoniev 1966:55;

Haiman 2011:43, 74) In a sampling of 4,500 lexical entries from a Khmer dictionary, Gorgoniev

(1966:54–5) found 222 words formed with kaː, 36 words formed with səckdəj and 121 words formed with

neak On the productivity of derivation via kaː, Haiman (2011:48) remarks: “I have never encountered a

case when this nominalization is rejected as ungrammatical, for any verb.” On that of neak, he writes: “So

regular is this process that one is hesitant to categorize it with derivational morphological phenomena at all” (Haiman 2011:74)

For both Gorgoniev and Haiman, the temptation to view these three lexemes more as affixes than as full lexical words stems from the words’ reduced semantics in the ‘derived’ forms Gorgoniev (1966:54) defines his category of ‘semi-affixes’ as “elements which have not lost their lexical meaning altogether, but recurring in a large number of words have assumed the character of seminotional [sic] affixes, that is

to say, of affixes with traces of lexical meaning.” Yet, while Gorgoniev’s designation of ‘semi-affix’ leaves one unsure as to the formatives’ precise lexical status, Haiman uses the same semantic criterion to establish a specific threshold for deciding between an independent syntactic word and a grammatical affix He writes: “…[A] morpheme is a derivational affix if its meaning is no longer exactly the same as

the word that it sounds exactly like” (2011:43) Taking neak as an example, Haiman (2011:44) states that

as long as the word maintains its principle independent lexical meaning, “it will be treated in the syntax as

a head noun rather than in the morphology as an agentive prefix.” Haiman warns that his approach will seem insufficiently restrictive for skeptical readers Indeed, Jacob (1993:54) had earlier expressed doubts about Gorgoniev’s similar analysis, noting: “The semiprefixes might equally be treated as noun-

components used with high frequency in the first position in a compound….”

The purpose of this squib is to investigate Haiman’s and Gorgoniev’s claims for the (semi)prefixal

status of the native Khmer formative neak I argue that agentive neak constructions are not simply

phrases formed in syntax, as is shown by the fact that they cannot take tense/aspect/modality (TAM) marking nor accommodate modifiers or determiners inserted between the core constituents and are restricted in what argument structure they can display by lexical, not syntactic, requirements I also claim

that while neak constructions resemble verbal compounds in their internal structure and occasionally

lexicalized semantics, they may yet be differentiated from such compounds by the high degree of

semantic bleaching of neak, its use with nouns that are either inherently agentive or already possess their

own agentive morphology, and its lexicalized use to distinguish the female practitioner of the given profession or activity named in the verb from her male counterpart

The structure of the paper is as follows In section 2, I consider the peculiar nature of morphology in Khmer and the strangeness of claiming derivational morphology for an isolating language Section 3

tackles the arguments for and against the syntactic formation of neak constructions, as well as something

of the history of syntactic treatments of morphological phenomena In section 4, I turn to arguments for

and against viewing neak constructions as verbal compounds The conclusion considers implications of

the study for another formative in Khmer that seems to be have been largely grammaticalized to the status

of a pluralizing prefix: puak This particular word forms a nice counterpoint to neak since it functions to

mark inflectional, rather than derivational, meaning

2 Derivational morphology in an isolating language?

Aikhenvald (2007:3–5) structures much of her discussion of the typology of word formation around two parameters which she contends have been used in the linguistic literature since the nineteenth century

to assess morphology from a typological perspective They are the transparency of word-internal

boundaries and the internal complexity of words Languages which display little-to-no internal boundaries

or complexity in their words are classified as isolating and analytic Aikhenvald singles out Chinese and Vietnamese as prototypical examples In both languages, the only synchronically productive

morphological process is compounding, which can be prolific indeed It has been estimated that as much

as 80% of the Modern Mandarin Chinese vocabulary consists of disyllabic words (Yuzhi 2002:71) Giventhe widely recognized near-total isomorphism between syllable and morpheme in Mandarin (Chao 1968:138–9), disyllabic words must by definition consist of two lexical morphemes As a result,

Mandarin has been described as “a language of compound words” (Arcodia 2007:83)

Khmer is another language Aikhenvald (2007:43–4) singles out as being of the isolating type She characterizes what non-compounding derivational morphology is apparent in Khmer as “fossilized,” comprising “just some relics of non-category-changing morphology.” In his recent reference grammar of Khmer, Haiman (2011:164) observes that Khmer lacks inflectional morphology as well Schiller

(1989:280) concludes similarly:

Essentially, Khmer words are all of the same morphological category, and cannot be inflected Compounding is possible, however, and quite prolific There are some items which appear to have affixes (prefixed and infixes), but these are simply vestiges of morphology from the era of Old and Middle Khmer, which had productive affixation Aronoff and Fudeman (2011:179) offer as a primary characteristic of isolating languages that they evidence “no derivational or inflectional processes of any kind.” The observations of Khmer by

Aikhenvald, Haiman, and Schiller would seem to bear this generalization out

Thus it comes as some surprise to find Haiman rather more sanguine about the possibility of compounding derivational morphology in Khmer He writes: “Like most SE Asian languages, including Chinese, Khmer seems to rely heavily on positional syntactic criteria However, more than most of these languages, Khmer also seems to have some derivational affixation” (2003:508) In introducing the third chapter of his grammar entitled “Derivational morphology and word formation,” Haiman (2011:43) observes: “A recurrent analytical problem when dealing with an isolating language like Khmer is the identification of derivational morphemes as such.” Here he implies that negative assessments of the existence of derivational morphology in Khmer likely stem from a misapprehension of the true nature of morphology in the language “[O]ne man’s word,” he writes tellingly, “is another man’s affix” (Haiman 2011:43)

non-Haiman uses the example given in (1) to illustrate the analytical problem posed by the possible

affix-word neak ‘person’.

According to Haiman (2011:43), this string of just two words can be interpreted in three rather distinct ways: i) as a complete sentence with unmarked SVO word order (2); ii) as a reduced relative clause (3); or iii) as a single, agentive NP (4)

(3) ‘(the) person (who) reads’

A few background facts about Khmer are needed to clarify what at first blush might seem a dubious or even outlandish claim

First, Khmer orthography does not use spaces between words within phrases; spaces occur as punctuation only between sense units, as between a subordinate clause and the matrix clause for example(Smyth 2008:14) Thus, words with derivational morphology inherited from Pali such as (5) and obvious native compounds such as (6) both appear as single orthographic words in Khmer.1

‘son’ (Smyth 2008:228, transcription regularized)

Second, native Khmer words all have either a monosyllabic or a so-called ‘sesquisyllabic’ pattern, the latter consisting of an initial unstressed half-syllable (the anacrusic syllable) followed by a main, stressed syllable (Haiman 2011:29; Huffman 1967:44–5; Huffman 1987:11; Gorgoniev 1966:30–5) While the sesquisyllabic syllable template has historically exerted intense pressure on words with

inherited infixes and prefixes from earlier periods of the language, causing phonological reductions and deletions (Haiman 1998; Farmer 2009), compounds in modern Khmer consist of full disyllables: that is, each word in the compound for the most part retains its full phonological shape and stress (Jacob

1968:198–9) Thus, there are no consistent phonetic cues to disambiguate single derived words from compounds (Haiman 2011:43).2

Third, relative clauses in Khmer are standardly introduced by the relativizer/complementizer dael,

which also serves to introduce various types of complement clauses (Comrie & Horie 1995:73) Subjects, primary and secondary (i.e indirect) objects, and possessors can all be relativized: subjects and secondaryobjects via the gap strategy or pronoun retention, objects by gap only, and possessors via pronoun

retention only (Natchanan 2005:123) In addition, the relativizer dael can be dropped from most relative

clauses without complication, giving rise to reduced relative clauses (Haiman 2011:313–4) While

Haiman notes that “[t]here seems to be no clear rule regarding when the dael is required,” all of the examples he cites of situations where the clause is attested without dael though his consultants reported

the relativizer could be included, and vice versa, involve the subject as relativized function and the gap strategy as relativization strategy Thus, the reduced relative clauses Haiman cites as attested appear identical in structure to example (1) above, with overt SV word order (7) Though Haiman cites these examples with the relativizer included as optional within parentheses, I give the phrases as attested,

without the optional dael, so as to highlight their actual similarity to (1).

(7) a kreː pɛːt miən kɑŋ ruɲ

bed hospital have wheel push

‘hospital gurney’

b miən plav ʔɑt mnuh daə

have path NEG person walk

‘there is a path that is untraveled’

body.hair grow in place secret secret

1 For the notion of ‘orthographic word’ and the disconnect between it and other notions of wordhood, see Packard (2000:7–8) and Dixon (2009:5–7, 35)

2 Aikhenvald (2007:25) notes that this same problem exists in both Boumaa Fijian and Portuguese, where the components of compounds retain their independent phonological status (cf Dixon 1988:226)

‘body hair which grows in secret areas’ (Haiman 2011:313, transcription regularized)

Following Kroeger (2004:5), I take it to be axiomatic that the structural ambiguities behind the variant readings in (2)-(4) disclose the otherwise invisible structural relationships that exist between and among strings of words These different interpretations arise from differences in the actual linguistic structures that exist unseen in the understanding of users of the language; they are not simply semantic or pragmatic issues Thus, to the interpretations in (2)-(4), we could assign the phrase structure

representations in Figure 1-Figure 3, respectively

Figure 1: Phrase structure for (2)

Figure 2: Phrase structure for(3)

Figure 3: Phrase structure for (4)

It is reading (4) which calls into question the lexical status of neak That is, this interpretation prompts Haiman (2011:43, 164) to question whether neak might not evidence a pattern of

grammaticalization in its use in the modern language that we might call ‘morphologization’ following Joseph and Janda (1988) Joseph and Janda (1988:195–6) define morphologization as a transition from a generalization that is non-morphological to one that is, involving movement of syntactic and phonologicalphenomena into the morphological domain.3

Though isolating languages are sometimes claimed to lack morphology, morphologization in isolating languages is well documented; Mandarin Chinese provides a good example At the conclusion of

a 1971 study in which he offered an analysis of, among other morphologized syntactic phenomena, the formation of person-agreement affixes in Bantu from free pronouns, Givón paraphrases an analect

3 NB: This definition seems largely indistinguishable from that of simple ‘grammaticalization’, as discussed byHopper and Traugott (2003:19, 21): they follow Meillet in applying the term to “the development of grammatical morphemes out of earlier lexical formatives.”

variously attributed to both Confucius and Lao-tzu in which, on being informed that Chinese was an isolating language, the sage reportedly replied: “Weep not, my children, for today’s syntax is tomorrow’s morphology” (Givón 1971:413, n 1) Both Li and Thompson (1989) and Packard (2000) include in their grammars of Mandarin significant discussions of bound morphology, most of it traceable historically to independent lexemes And much work continues to be done on grammaticalization and morphologization

in the language, involving such diverse phenomena as adverbs incorporating into verbs, resultative verb constructions morphing into aspect markers, and full lexical verbs being reinterpreted as prepositions (e.g.Sun 1996; Chui 2000; Lord, Yap & Iwasaki 2002; Lim & Ansaldo 2002; Zhang 2011)

Matisoff (1991:392) cites an example of grammaticalization from the isolating Loloish language Lahu that is particularly apropos An independent lexeme meaning ‘female proprietary spirit’ has a grammaticalized usage in Lahu on the basis of the semantic components of ownership and control as the feminine agentive nominalizer seen in (8) Other grammaticalized uses of this same word include as a feminine reflexive pronoun and a lexical noun meaning ‘female body’

3SG must help birth give female.spirit/NMLZ

‘she who must help give birth, midwife’ (Matisoff’s transcription preserved)

Yao’an Lolo provides another example even closer to the Khmer neak construction once allowances are made for the differing word order parameters In Yao’an Lolo, the independent lexeme su ‘person

who’ is used to nominalize entire clauses in order to render an agentive reading (Merrifield 2010:26, 149–51) An example is given in (9)

(9) Niul var vur su ddei leil zzirbae gger nia

1PL vegetables sell NMLZ CL to money give must

‘We must give the person who sells vegetables money’ (Merrifield 2010:151, practical orthography preserved)

Haiman suggests that neak is on its way to becoming less an independent lexical item and more a

grammatical affix in much the same way as the Lahu šɛ̄-ma and Yao’an Lolo su

Were Haiman alone in his tentatively affixal analysis of neak, we might feel inclined to dismiss his

musings as a sort of provocativeness for provocativeness’ sake, attempting to apply to a well-known isolating language categories and concepts appropriate to more heavily inflected languages such as those

of the Austronesian or Indo-European families Yet before him, Gorgoniev (1966:54–5; cf Jacob

1993:54) had already classified neak in the group he designates as “semi-prefixes,” itself part of a larger

category of “semi-affixes” that “play a very important part in the derivation of new words.” Like Haiman,Gorgoniev was struck by the apparent productivity of the semi-affixal forms; he writes: “[Traditional affixes] are being replaced by words formed by new means, in particular by ‘semi-affixes’… The author

of this book also had occasion to observe ordinary peasants in remote villages use words with new

‘semi-affixes’ in their speech rather than the words with the old infixes (e.g kaːsaəc instead of sɑmnaəc

‘laughter’)” (1966:47) He likewise felt the semantics of affixes like neak attenuating in such coinages, in

which the word attached closely to a following verb in the manner of a compound

However, Gorgoniev’s initial observation in the subsection on ‘semi-affixes’ that they are “[c]losely linked with word composition by origin” (Gorgoniev 1966:54) brings us back to a central question in seeking to investigate the possibly valid intuition shared by both Gorgoniev and Haiman Since

modification and complementation both occur to the right in Khmer and relative clauses may occur without relativizer and often employ the gap strategy for the relativized function of subject, how can we

distinguish between the three possible interpretations of agentive neak forms given in Figure 1-Figure 3

above? Furthermore, assuming we manage that disambiguation, how can we additionally distinguish an affixal structure as in Figure 3 from a simple synthetic compound, especially given that Khmer makes frequent use of compounds?

In the next section, I examine the morphology-syntax interface and discuss diagnostic tests designed

to tease the one apart from the other in Khmer

3 Morphology and Syntax

Spencer (2005:74) traces the tendency to view syntax and word-formation as indistinguishable to the early days of American Structuralist linguistics, when scholars like Bloomfield, Harris, Hockett, and Gleason came to view syntax as a concatenation of morphemes In essence, both word order in more configurational languages like English and the complex morphologies of Native American polysynthetic languages could be reduced to representation in position class charts The legacy of this approach, both in the work of Chomsky and that of generative linguists working in the tradition known as Word Syntax, hasbeen to represent derivational or inflectional formatives as terminal nodes in syntax (Spencer 2005:74–5)

A critical symmetry is thus created between phrase structure and word structure: both phrases and words are considered to be endocentric or headed by an element contained within them which determines the properties of the whole through a process of feature percolation So in the case of an English derived

agentive nominal in -er, it is the suffix that determines the category of the nominal as a whole (Beard

2001:48, 51; Bauer 2003:177–82) The same conclusion would hold true as well for synthetic compounds,

in which the right-hand member is a derived nominal like the agentive -er form and the left-hand member

is interpreted as its complement or internal argument (Fabb 2001:68–9, 75) A controversial proposal known as the Right-hand Head Rule (Williams 1981; Fabb 2001:70) has even maintained that the head of

a compound or a derived word will always appear on the right This claim has proven controversial both

due to the large number of apparent exceptions in English (e.g bewitch, dethrone, overpass) and because

it clearly cannot apply across languages (Bauer 2003:182)

Vietnamese provides an example of a language where heads appear consistently on the left rather than on the right (Lieber 1980:99) In this respect, the language resembles its distant linguistic relative Khmer Not surprisingly, Vietnamese also has an agentive-type construction that patterns similarly to the

neak phrases in Khmer In Vietnamese, the head word is người ‘person’ which is followed by a verb and

its dependents, exactly as in Khmer An example is provided in (10)

‘greedy person’ (lit ‘liker of profit’) (Thompson 1984:112–3)

Thus, both Khmer and Vietnamese seem amenable to a strict Word Syntax type of analysis with left-handheads that determine the categories and features of the resultant phrases (cf Jacob 1993:54–5) This conception ends up looking strikingly similar to the ‘phrase’ structure representation given in Figure 2 above The problem is that the structure in (10) could also be represented as a full clause, as in Figure 1 Thompson (1984:126) writes: “In a language like Vietnamese, which is strongly syntactic or isolating (as opposed to synthetic languages like Latin or Russian or even English), it is not surprising that the

distinction between the word and the phrase is not as clear as in languages where word boundaries are unambiguous.” Notice that, for Thompson, syntactic is apparently another term for isolating, as though such languages had only syntactic means at their disposal with which to form words, phrases, or any otherstructure.4 This thinking likely underlies the frequent claim that compounding is the sole productive path

to word-formation in languages like Khmer and Vietnamese Thompson goes on to point out, though, that

even in English, ambiguous boundaries can be found, as is the case with nominals (NPs?) like

jack-in-the-box and jack of all trades Nevertheless, as far as so-called agentive nominals are concerned, the

boundaries are seldom, if ever, fuzzy in English In synthetic compounds, the complements line up on the left-hand, in unaccustomed preverbal position, derived agentive nominalizations require complements to appear on the right like normal complements though in the genitive (11)

4 Cf Comrie and Horie (1995:74) and Song (2001:13–4): Since the relativizer dael is also a complementizer,

there is no structural difference between relative clauses and complement clauses of a head noun; that is, relative clauses do not exist in Khmer as a separate construction Song (2001:14) writes: “In other words, they [i.e Comrie and Horie] suggest that languages which lack relative clauses, such as Japanese and Khmer, make use of a general syntactic construction for relating subordinate clauses to head nouns, which is in  turn subject to a wide range of pragmatic, not semantic, interpretations including that of relative clauses.”

(11) a profit-lover

This observation gets at a fundamental difference between the English and Vietnamese/Khmer agentive constructions that has prompted an interesting generalization from some generative linguists Onthe basis of the structures in (10) and (11), Brousseau (1989:37; Fabb 2001:71) has claimed that synthetic compounds are only possible in languages where the direction of modification differs from the direction

of complementation, as in English According to Brousseau, languages like French, in which both

modification and complementation occur to the right of the head, do not have synthetic compounds (cf Fabb 2001:68, 71) Thus Khmer and Vietnamese, which also feature rightward complementation and modification, should likewise lack synthetic compounds If this conclusion is correct, it would seem to mean that the structures in (1) and (10) can only be construed as syntactic phrases.5 Such appears to be

conclusion Haiman (2011:44) himself reaches: “There is no doubt that neak is undergoing

grammaticalization here, but until there are more than a handful of examples [where neak can no longer

be glossed as ‘person’], it will be treated in the syntax as a head noun rather than in the morphology as an agentive prefix.” This consideration, in turn, raises another interesting implication for the agentive constructions in isolating languages, one that makes testable predictions

In 1970, Chomsky rethought the strictly transformational-generative approach to word-formation in the context of English deverbal nouns (Bauer 2003:167; Beard 2001) He realized there was a disconnect

between derived nominals like destruction and gerunds like destroying In particular, while both

constructions have the external distribution of NPs, derived nominals also have the internal structure of NPs, while gerunds have the internal structure of VPs (Chomsky 1970:189) Thus, derived nominals contain strictly NP elements like determiners, adjectives, potential for plural number, and complements

marked by the preposition of, while gerunds have strictly VP elements like adverbs, bare NP objects, and

TAM marking (Kroeger 2004:46) In addition, if overtly expressed, the subject of a derived nominal is required to be in a genitive form, while that of a gerund may appear in either the accusative or genitive(Kroeger 2004:47) Chomsky’s realization of these facts resulted in the formulation of the Lexicalist Hypothesis, according to which derived nominals are formed in the Lexicon and are visible to syntax only

as whole words while gerunds are constructed in syntax according to generative principles If the agentivestructures in Khmer and similar isolating languages are strictly syntactic constructions, then, we would expect them to display the same internal structure of a VP evident with English gerunds Such is not necessarily the case, however

The evidence from a variety of isolating languages suggests that agentive nominalizations do not have the full internal structure of VPs Instead, they tend to prohibit or express a strong dispreference for TAM marking and adverbial elements and occasionally permit a reduced argument structure Merrifield

(2010:150) notes that Yao’an Lolo agentive nominalizations with su cannot take aspect particles or mode

words Moreover, while they can take aspect auxiliaries, they exhibit a clear preference not to include anyTAM marking at all She cites the example in (12) as an illustration

(12) xie zi (*dae/ar/var/ddo/cexr/nia)su

house build IPFV/PFV/can/able/capable/will NMLZ

‘person who builds house [sic]’ (Merrifield 2010:150)

On the other hand, there do not appear to be any restrictions as to the realization of arguments of the verb

in agentive nominalizations in Yao’an Lolo nor on the complexity of the verb itself Example (13) shows

a serial verb construction and a three-place predicate inside an agentive nominalization

5 NB: I take it for granted that what is at stake in the discussion of the directionality of synthetic compounds transcends the trivial observation that languages without prenominal modification would have a different word orderfrom English Rather, what is in question is whether languages like Khmer might have verbal compounds in which what is interpreted semantically as the verbal complement is not a syntactically visible complement

(13) Ngo ngo leil xie vur gger su ssormaer ddei leil mia ar

hal-1SG 1SG to house sell give NMLZ woman that-CL tosee PFV

‘I saw the woman, the one who sold me the house.’ (Merrifield 2010:150–1)

We can contrast this behavior with that shown from Mandarin Chinese in example (14) Here, the place predicate mài ‘sell’ is unable to take an indirect object As Li and Thompson (1989:579) explain, when a nominalization is used alone as a NP, it is always ungrammatical to include the secondary object

intermediate between that of NPs and VPs The neak constructions in Khmer exhibit a similar special

internal structure

Before reviewing the internal structure of Khmer neak constructions, it is necessary to establish

through examples that their external distribution is that of a NP This is shown in (15) Khmer uses the

copula ciə ‘be’ only for equative clauses (Haiman 2011:212); for attributive and locative clauses,

adjectives and the verb nɨw ‘be located at’ function as the respective primary predicates If a construction can follow ciə in an equative clause, it must be considered a NP

pig be person predict prognosticate

‘The pig is a prophet.’ (Haiman 2011:212)

b ʔəjləw nih koət ciə neak luək krɨəŋ-tok-tuː

now DEM 3SG be person sell furniture

‘Now, he’s a furniture salesman.’ (Huffman, Promchan & Lambert 1970:103)

Another reliable indication of the NP status of the neak constructions is their ability to stand in apposition

to other NPs Example (16) shows an agentive nominalization with adjectival modifier standing in

apposition to the personal pronoun jəːŋ ‘we’

(16) neak cumliəh tmej jəːŋ

personflee new 1pl

‘We new refugees’ (lit ‘fleers’) (Haiman 2011:146)

However, not all NP complements of ciə headed by neak are available for interpretation as agentive

constructions As example (17) shows, the inclusion of an adverbial phrase of comparison and the

embedded clause after ceh ‘know’ is incompatible with the agentive interpretation of the neak

construction

(17) kɲom mɨn ciə neak ceh sansɑːm-sɔmcajdoːc

1sg neg be person know economize like group Khmer

ceh ‘know’ without an embedded complement clause but with an explicit aspect marker, the postposed

verb haəj ‘finish’ Again, no interpretation as an agentive nominalization is available for this sentence

khmaɛ haəj

FOC say be book for help person know Khmer PFV

‘That is to say: it’s a book to help people who already know Khmer.’ (Haiman 2011:249)

Example (19) shows the inclusion of the modal verb trəw ‘hit’, which is used in Khmer as a primary

marker of deontic modality (de Haan 1997:52–4) It, too, is incompatible with the agentive reading

(19) haet əʋəj baːn ciə neak cɑmbɑc trəw kraleːtməːladejta kaːl

cause which get be person necessary must glance look

past time

‘Why (is it that) people must pay attention to the past?” (Haiman 2011:235)

If markers of modality are to be included, a full relative clause construction is more common, as in (20) and (21)

(20) puəlləroət mneak-mneak trəw taɛ juəl thaː kluən ciə

citizen one.person-one.person must only understand say self

‘Each and every citizen should understand that he is someone who should make the country progress.’ (Fisher 1988:30)

(21) neak damnaə cumliəh tmej dael trəw tɯh vivaut tɨwkan kanlæŋ

person journey evacuate new REL must task evolve go to

placepseːŋ-pseːŋ tiət

‘only one time’ No agentive reading is possible

bɑŋkaət phiasaː laəŋ teəŋ

NEG really have person any be person start create language

up allmuːl taɛ muaj dɑːŋ

entire only one time

‘There is nobody who invented all of language all at once.’ (Haiman 2011:251)

6 The phrase ‘new people’ designated urban dwellers forcibly removed to perform manual labor in the countryside during the Pol Pot years (Smyth 2008:118–20)

In a similar manner to the su nominalizations of Yao’an Lolo, however, Khmer agentive neak constructions can include serial verbs, as is shown in the phrase neak damnaə cumliəh ‘person journey evacuate’ from (21) above Thus, Khmer agentive neak constructions possess some unambiguous VP

traits while disallowing others

A further indicator that the internal structure of Khmer agentive neak nominalizations is not identical

to that of normal VP stems from the fact that canonically transitive verbs can be used as modifiers for the

head word neak without any explicit objects In these cases, the verb indicates no particular instance of the denoted action but rather attributes to the head neak and its referent habitual or iterative engagement

in the activity named by the verb I give examples in (23)

(23) a miənneak praə ciə craːən dael miən kaːcralɑm craboːk crabɑl klah

have person use be many REL have NMLZ confuseconfuse busysome

‘There are many users who experience confusion.’ (Haiman 2011:314)

b kawː nɨw taɛ pibaːk dəːŋ thaː haet əʋəj baːn ciə neak

still be.at but difficult know say cause what get beperson

dək-noəm baːn klaːj ciə vana meː kɑmlaŋ

lead become turn be caste master strength

‘It is still difficult to know what turned the leadership [lit ‘leaders’] into aruling class.’ (Haiman 2011:318)

mɨn

neg

peɲ cət daɛ

full heart also

‘However the servant does it, he isn’t satisfied.’ (Jacob 1968:129;

Haiman 2011:331)

‘Wait until I (just let me) call the waiter.’ (Huffman, Promchan & Lambert1970:173)

‘for acquiring the reader’s trust’ (Haiman 2011:247)

It is interesting to note that bɑmraə ‘serve’ in (23) is in fact the morphological causative of praə ‘use’ in

(23) While the word can be used as a noun, its primary function is as a transitive verb (Haiman 2011:56,

202, 261, 392)

Insofar as the semantics of the agentive forms in the sentences in (23) do not entail a specific

instance of the events denoted by the verbs, this usage of the Khmer neak construction closely

approximates a trait of English agentive synthetic compounds that has been discussed by Rappaport Hovav and Levin (1992) and Van Hout and Roeper (1998) (Spencer 2005:90) Both teams of scholars

notice that agentive synthetic compounds like life-saver and lawn-mower do not entail an actual event;

they can be applied equally to a person who has yet to undertake the action denoted in the verb (as, for example, a person newly hired to the profession) or to the instrument of such a profession (as, for

example, the physical objects designated as life-savers and lawn-mowers) On the other hand, the

corresponding agentive derived nominals saver of lives and mower of lawns do entail a performance of

the event and normally only refer to actual human agents of the actions involved (Rappaport Hovav & Levin 1992:133–4; Van Hout & Roeper 1998:175–6) Rappaport Hovav and Levin explain these

interesting differences as resulting from a lack of complement structure inheritance and an empty event position in argument structure for the synthetic compounds; for the derived nominals, the event position isfilled and the full complement structure of the underlying verb is inherited by the derived expression VanHout and Roeper invoke a complex minimalist view of verbal syntax where both full verbs and derived nominals contain a VP as well as tense, aspect, and event-voice phrase projections (i.e TP, AspP, Voice-EventP) These projections lie above the level of VP and are missing in the synthetic compounds Rather, synthetic compounds involve base-generated complements in object position that move via head-to-head movement to the preverbal position in an incorporation operation that blocks checking of event-related features like aspect and tense Derived agentive nominalizations do not, however, have the complete internal structure of a VP, insofar as they cannot contain adverbs, voice-markers, aspect, or negation(Baker & Vinokurova 2009:517) For this reason, Baker and Vinokurova (2009:528) have suggested that derived agentive nominalizations are formed as Voice Heads, at the level of syntax directly above VP but below TP and AspP Thus, these nominalizations combine directly with a bare VP and possess only so much VP structure as the ability to assign objects and event entailment Despite the fact that, as we saw above, languages like French and Spanish have been claimed to lack synthetic compounds, these two languages offer deverbal structures that exhibit these same semantic phenomena in a way that perhaps belies such claims

Both Spanish and French have a verbal compound involving the third person singular present active indicative of a relevant verb followed directly by an apparent complement which is generally either written together with the verb or conjoined with it via a hyphen This ‘object’ must be entirely lacking in specificity and thus can take neither indefinite nor definite article; instead, it appears either as a bare singular or bare plural Examples of these constructions are given in (24)

Though the complements vaisselle and vajillas occur to the right of the verb as though they were normal

objects, the fact that they cannot take articles indicates that, to some extent, they are not syntactically visible objects but have been incorporated, or rather most likely pseudo-incorporated, into the VP.7 This fact can be demonstrated by the failure of both constructions to accept modification of the apparent objects, shown in (25)

interpretation of the correct forms in (24) is as referring to a machine that performs the job function, not

7 On pseudo-incorporation, see Dayal (2011) and Baker (2011)