‘somebody’ or ‘nobody’ in Mainland Southeast Asian Languages

What is it about?

In some languages assertions about ‘somebody’ or ‘nobody’ are existential in a strong sense, i.e. they need or prominently allow an explicit syntactic marker of existence (‘there is’, ‘exist’). This paper presents a state-of-the-art typology of existential indefinite constructions and finds the typological understanding to be inconclusive in many respects.

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Photo by Ludovico Lovisetto on Unsplash

Photo by Ludovico Lovisetto on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The paper responds to this inconclusiveness with a study of the existential indefinite constructions in four mainland Southeast Asian languages, namely Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, and Khmer. These are languages in which existential indefinite constructions take pride of place, although the typological literature has not acknowledged this.

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