Download or read book Studies in Burmese Linguistics written by Justin Watkins and published by Pacific Linguistics. This book was released on 2005 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies in Burmese Linguistics' is a unique collection of articles dedicated to the linguistics of Burmese, a major language of South East Asia with perhaps forty million speakers, more than any other language in the diverse Tibeto-Burman language family. The articles cover various sub-disciplines within linguistics which will be of general interest to a broad constituency of linguists, including the phonology and the phonetics of constituent focus, a synchronic and diachronic treatment of reflexives, a discussion of optionality in morphosyntax, an analysis of the grammaticalisation of the verb 'give' as a causativiser, three complementary articles on the verbal tense-mode-aspect system and two on Old Burmese, the language of 11-13th Century inscriptions. There is also a report of a major German-Burmese lexicography project. The contributors have been invited to write on research topics of their own choosing, making the volume a representative of current research on Burmese rather than a systematic linguistic survey of the language. While not all the articles are theory-neutral, the book has been edited to ensure accessibility to a broad readership, as well as consistent transcription, transliteration and linguistic glossing across all the articles.