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. 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. The paper then sketches the implications of the study of the aforementioned languages for typology.
Languages can be divided into three types with respect to the encoding of comitatives and instrumentals: identity, differentiation and mixed (Stolz, Stroh and Urdze 2013). Diachronic data from Thai dating from 13th to 21st centuries ce suggests that these three language types correspond to the three stages of development of the relation between the two categories in Thai, which progress as follows. Between the 13th and the mid-18th centuries, Thai employed the pattern of identity. In general, the preposition dûaj ‘with’ was the relator for the two categories. Later, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Thai displayed mixed structures. While the preposition dûaj was preserved to encode both categories, the preposition kàp ‘and/with’ was also the relator for the comitative. Still later, from the mid-19th century to the present, Thai favored differentiation. The preposition dûaj remains in its function as an instrumental relator, while the preposition kàp has been employed as a comitative relator.
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