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Part of
Conceptualizations of Time
Edited by Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk
[Human Cognitive Processing 52] 2016
► pp. 243–270

Marking anteriority, perfect and perfectivity in languages of mainland Southeast Asia – concepts, linguistic area

As a result of language contact, Southeast Asian languages belonging to different language families share features, such as phonemic tone and numeral classifiers. Similarities between Southeast Asian languages in the frequency of explicit temporal marking, and the reference to spatial and temporal relations with markers related to motion verbs might be also the result of language contact. Descriptions of markers of Southeast Asian languages that express temporal relations, differ in the literature due to their polysemy and due to the application of seemingly universal categories to the description of language specific concepts. This paper discusses universal categories and polysemy before presenting and comparing those grammatical markers of Burmese, Lao, Thai and Vietnamese that are associated with the marking of the categories past, anteriority, perfect or perfectivity.

Keywords: language contact, motion verb, polysemy, spatial relations, temporal relations
Published online: 14 June 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.52.11bor
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