Outline of Sre structure

Abstract

Sre, also known as Koho, is a Mon Khmer language of the Austroasiatic stock spoken by a group of Montagnards inhabiting the South Vietnamese city of Di Linh and surrounding; area. Thomas, on the basis of lexico-statistics, divides the Mon Khmer languages of South Vietnam into a northern group, Katuic, and a southern group, Bahnaric; the Bahnaric group is further subdivided into Bahnaran (north Bahnaric) and Stiengan (south Bahnaric); and Sre (Koho) is placed in this latter group. Sre exhibits many of the areal features common to the languages of the Indo-Chinese peninsula. Phonologically, it utilizes lexical tone (although not extensively); has preglottalized (imploded) consonants; and, like Khmer, the vowel system has two registers. Lexically, it is mostly monosyllabic. Syntactically, Sre is analytic, affixation having died out almost completely as an active process; it uses the numeral-classifier-noun device for enumerating nouns - the most common and geographically widespread enumerative device in the area; and, like Vietnamese, its noun phrases are characterized by having restrictive complements (numerals, specifiers) preceding the head noun and descriptive complements of various kinds (nouns, adjectives, sentences, determiners) following it. This study has two principal goals: (1) to describe the basic phonological and syntactic facts of the language; and (2) to apply a recent version of transformational-generative grammar which recognizes the importance of case relations and which incorporates mechanisms for handling them lexically. In addition an attempt is made - in one short, tangential chapter -to describe and interpret some of the archaic morphological devices of the language. It has been found that Sre has eleven case relations, expressed through nine surface manifestations, called case forms or case realizations. These case relations have syntactic consequences. In particular, they make it possible to subcategorize verbs in an economical and natural way through the use of case frames. A case frame is a device for stipulating which actants can occur with which verbs (an actant is a noun phrase marked for a particular case relation). They also make possible a keener understanding of functions like 'subject', which in Sre is found to constitute a neutralization of four different case relations (similar to Fillmore's findings for English).