Vietnamese Classifiers in Narrative Texts (SIL International and the University of Texas at Arlington Publications in Linguistics, vol.125) - Softcover

Daley, Karen Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556710216 ISBN 13: 9781556710216

Publisher: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1998

Synopsis

"Karen Daley leads the reader into what is perhaps the first discourse study of Vietnamese classifiers to date. After presenting a summary of classifiers and their function in languages of the world, she challenges the validity of regarding Vietnamese classifiers as simply fitting the prototypical pattern of phrase-level numeral classifiers. In Vietnamese several of the functions attributed to classifiers imply discourse relations, despite the prevailing assumption that their use is associated with the syntactic relations of phrases. A coherent pattern of classifier use becomes evident when they are observed in the larger syntactic environment of discourse. Daley uses discourse measurements of overall frequency, referential distance, and referential persistence and compares them with four criteria from a study of classifiers in White Hmong. The results in the present study indicate that the basic function of classifiers in Vietnamese discourse is referential-to mark salience.

Edition details

• Publisher: Summer Institute of Linguistics
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1556710216
• ISBN 13: 9781556710216
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 222