A Grammar of Lao

A Grammar of Lao N. J. Enfield Published by Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 2007. NOTE: This is an author's private copy, for off-prints. It is strictly not for distribution. For my love vi Preface To understand language, nothing compares with the task of trying to work one’s way through the wings of a grand mansion like Lao. It brings un- foreseen adventures. Mapping out the lay of the land, one quickly realizes that this house harbors hidden chamber after hidden chamber, secret stair- wells, false walls, doorways papered over, whole basements and rooftops undiscovered, mazes, gardens, chapels, cellars and rabbit warrens, it goes on and on without end. So, to repeat a cliche,´ but a well deserved one: this grammar is incomplete. It is a progress report on a life long project. It is a partial description, an imbalanced description, and in ways an in- adequate description. But one has to stop somewhere if the work is to emerge. One way in which this description merely approximates the phenome- non of interest is through abstracting, following standard descriptive linguistic practice, from social variation inherent in the language. Lao—like any language—is a dynamic, social, variable, changing system of sounds, words, idioms, constructions, and strategies. Lao speakers find them- selves in a wide range of social situations which will differently determine how they formulate the things they say: the constructions they employ, the words they select, the way they pronounce those words, among many other points of variation. Speakers respond artfully to local contexts and their social exigencies, applying and negotiating multiple sets of commu- nicative convention, both ritual and mundane. I am painfully aware of the richness of these important complexities, and of the consequences of bracketing them out of the current enterprise. I have tried to represent the social texture of Lao grammar where possible, for example by varying the formality of pronouns used in the example sentences. But dealing in detail with socially sensitive variation in Lao grammar is a topic for a different book. viii Preface A second way in which this description merely approximates the phe- nomenon of interest is that it takes the clause or sentence to be the basic unit of analysis. Many other unit types are relevant. For example, speech is chunked into turns at talk of a few seconds each, and these turns are in- terleaved in extended sequences, usually conversations. Those sequences, and the complex interactional practices which keep them orderly, have structures of their own, and these structures are seldom if ever described in grammars. Moreover, these linguistic structures occur in fully multi- modal contexts, where people simultaneously employ rich semiotic re- sources which are meaningfully related to their talk (e.g., gesture, eye gaze, bodily comportment). Again, I am painfully aware of these important components of what it takes to speak Lao, and of the consequences of bracketing them out of the present work. It’s another topic for a different book. These uncharacteristic apologies aside, the piece of Lao captured in this book may be a thin slice, but it is not a random one. I have tried to capture a variety of Lao which is typical of everyday, informal conversation among kin and familiars in rural or semi-rural village life. The analyses are based on empirical data from spontaneous speech of semi- rural villagers, of low to average levels of formal education (some non- literate, some with primary school education, some with high school), in narratives and conversation recorded in informal settings. The exclusive consideration of spoken rather than written language, and the emphasis on everyday, informal usage reflects a primary concern with language in its primordial format, and not the very recently emergent, modern, mas- saged, context-narrow structures which arise in the political environment of media, literacy, and standardization. A note to the non-specialist reader: This is a technical, reference description, not a primer, and not a rule book. While certain sections (e.g., Chapter 2) are easily accessible by the general reader, most of the work presumes a technical background in linguistics (at least to undergraduate level). If you are a speaker or learner of Lao, you may find this work useful as a reference. But it has no authority in any institutional or otherwise official sense. The book does not prescribe correct ways of speaking Lao. It describes the structures that native Lao speakers produce, even where these ways of speaking might be regarded by those in socio-political authority as incorrect, sub-standard, or otherwise defective. To the extent that it is possible to keep the two apart, this book focuses on the structure Preface ix of language, not on ideology about the structure of language. The patterns described here are norms, not rules. If you do not speak Lao and your aim is to learn, you might not find much joy in this book during the earliest stages of your studies. You could instead begin by amassing as many primers or phrase books as you can—none are perfect, all are useful— and work through them methodically, as you practice in the villages of lowland Laos. The main thing is to go forth and speak. If I fall short of delivering the ‘succinct, rigorous and sensitive master- piece’ that every language deserves (Ameka, Dench, and Evans 2006:v), I hope at least to have made progress in our understanding of Lao, and the relevance to linguistic science of some of its structures. Much work remains. Acknowledgements I thank my many friends and consultants in Laos who have helped me understand their language, especially Pitsana Vayaphanh, Nak Bouphanou- vong, Thongdeng Silakoun, Syban Khoukham, and Latsamay Sylavong. For friendship and support in Laos, I am grateful to these people, as well as Jim Chamberlain, Adam Chapman, Rachel Dechaineaux, Grant Evans, the Flint household, Joost Foppes, Yves Goudineau, Peter Koret, Michel Lorrillard, Kathryn Sweet, and the Vayaphanh household. I am grateful to the office of the Ecole´ Française d’Extreme-Orientˆ in Naxay for gener- ously supplying a place to work while in the city of Vientiane. For comments on various parts of the grammar, whether in written form, orally presented, or in conversation, I thank Sasha Aikhenvald, Fe- lix Ameka, Peter Austin, Walter Bisang, Jurgen¨ Bohnemeyer, Melissa Bowerman, David Bradley, Penny Brown, Jim Chamberlain, Adam Chap- man, Hilary Chappell, Bernard Comrie, Art Crisfield, Gerard´ Diffloth, Tony Diller, Bob Dixon, Matthew Dryer, Michael Dunn, Dominique Es- tival, Grant Evans, Nick Evans, Martina Faller, Bill Foley, Alice Gaby, David Gil, Cliff Goddard, Yves Goudineau, Bill Hanks, Nikolaus Him- melmann, Søren Ivarsson, Anthony Jukes, Paul Kockelman, Peter Ko- ret, Steve Levinson, Michel Lorrillard, Asifa Majid, Andrej Malchukov, Stephen Matthews, Bhuvana Narasimhan, John Newman, Andy Paw- ley, Boike Rehbein, Craig Reynolds, Alan Rumsey, Hans-Jurgen¨ Sasse, Eva Schultze-Berndt, Frank Seifart, Gunter Senft, Tanya Stivers, Mar- tin Stuart-Fox, Kingkarn Thepkanjana, Angela Terrill, Sylvia Tufvesson, Satoshi Uehara, and Anna Wierzbicka. I am especially grateful for ex- tensive and penetrating commentary at different stages from Tony Diller (early), Nick Evans (middle), and Paul Kockelman (late). None of these commentators are to be blamed for any errors or infelicities of this work. A number of sections of this book have appeared in earlier form. I am grateful to the publishers and editors involved for kindly giving me per- xii Acknowledgements mission to include revised sections of these publications as sections of this book: Case relations in Lao, a radically isolating language (in Handbook of Case, ed. A. Malchukov and A. Spencer, Oxford U. Press); Description of reciprocal events in Lao (in Reciprocals and Semantic Typology, ed. N. Evans, A. Gaby, S. C. Levinson, and A. Majid, John Benjamins); Verbs and Multi-verb sequences in Lao (in The Tai-Kadai Languages, ed. A. V. N. Diller, J. A. Edmondson, and Y. X. Luo, Routledge); Lao linguistics in the 20th century and since (in Bulletin of the Ecole´ Française d’Extreme-ˆ Orient, Special Issue ‘Recent Research on Laos’, ed. Y. Goudineau and M. Lorrillard); Encoding three-participant events in the Lao clause (Lin- guistics 45.3, 509-538); Depictive and other secondary predication in Lao (in Secondary Predication and Adverbial Modification, ed. N. P. Him- melmann and E. Schultze-Berndt. Oxford U. Press); Adjectives in Lao (in Adjective classes, ed. R. M. W. Dixon and A. Y. Aikhenvald. Oxford U. Press); Nominal classification in Lao (Sprachtypologie und Univer- salienforschung, 57.2/3, 117-143); Linguistic Epidemiology (Routledge- Curzon); Combinatoric properties of natural semantic metalanguage ex- pressions in Lao (in Meaning and Universal Grammar, ed. C. Goddard and A. Wierzbicka. John Benjamins); Lao as a national language (in Laos: Culture and Society, ed. G. Evans. Silkworm Books). During the time that I have been working on this grammar, I have also worked on a number of narrower topics in Lao semantics and pragmatics. These are being assembled for publication as a separate volume. Many Lao language examples provided in this book are from a corpus of spontaneous spoken language collected in Vientiane in 1996-1997. This corpus contains several hours of material, on a range of topics and styles, including procedural descriptions, jokes, informal conversation, myths, fables, life-story narratives. These are from a range of speakers, both male and female, varying in age from early teens to mid 80’s. Many other examples (and the texts supplied at the end of the book) are from a video-recorded corpus of everyday conversation which I began collecting in 2000. A number of examples are elicited by means of semi- experimental materials (stimulus-based elicitation).

Load more