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Description:
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Studies in Burmese Linguistics is a unique collection of articles dedicated
to the linguistics of Burmese, a major language of South East Asia with
perhaps forty million speakers, more than any other language in the diverse
Tibeto-Burman language family. The articles cover various sub-disciplines
within linguistics which will be of general interest to a broad
constituency of linguists, including the phonology and the phonetics of
constituent focus, a synchronic and diachronic treatment of reflexives, a
discussion of optionality in morphosyntax, an analysis of the
grammaticalisation of the verb 'give' as a causativiser, three
complementary articles on the verbal tense-mode-aspect system and two on
Old Burmese, the language of 11-13th Century inscriptions.
There is also a report of a major German-Burmese lexicography project. The
contributors have been invited to write on research topics of their own
choosing, making the volume a representative of current research on Burmese
rather than a systematic linguistic survey of the language. While not all
the articles are theory-neutral, the book has been edited to ensure
accessibility to a broad readership, as well as consistent transcription,
transliteration and linguistic glossing across all the articles.
The book is dedicated to the editor's first Burmese teacher, John Okell,
whose career teaching Burmese spans five decades.
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