Existential indefinite constructions, in the world and in Mainland Southeast Asia

Abstract

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.

Morphosemantic Features of Membuat ‘Make’ in the Light Verb Constructions of Indonesian

“…If only the surface structure were analyzed, one could deduce its existence. There is a clear underlying point of view in this regard that language is a manifestation of the form (schêma) and meaning (énnoia) (Lenci, 2018;van der Auwera et al, 2022).…”