Expressives in austroasiatic

Introduction: The Austroasiatic languages have often been recognized as showing a significant amount of transparently sound symbolic lexicon, although this alone is not a remarkable fact. However, since the 1960s, some scholars (e.g. Watson 1966, Diffloth 1976a, 1979 and others) have characterized various Austroasiatic (AA) languages (especially some Mon-Khmer languages) as having a special class of motivated forms. These are forms not immediately imitative or otherwise directly sound symbolic (in the way that, for example, the AA root for ‘ bird ’ *cim and similar forms are imitative of a bird ’ s cheeping), but through the use of strategies such as reduplication and unusual segmental collocations, index descriptive or expressive meanings. These so-called ‘ expressives ’ are claimed to effectively form a third major open class with distinct phonological, morphosyntactic, and semantic characteristics. Subsequently, within Austroasiatic (AA) studies, the term ‘ expressives ’ has gained wide currency, and attracted attention from time to time. For example, Burenhult (2005), introducing the topic of descriptives in the Aslian language Jahai, writes: Expressives, a category of words which forms a distinct word-class in many Austroasiatic languages, denote sensory perceptions of the speaker – visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, emotional or other – in relation to a particular phenomenon (Diffloth 1972, 1976a)…. They often display peculiar phonological and morphological features, and they function syntactically like sentence adjuncts. (Burenhult 2005: 113) Also in a discussion of Aslian languages, Matisoff explains: Perhaps the greatest single sweller of the Aslian vocabulary is the class of words Diffloth calls expressives. These words exist throughout Austroasiatic, though they have largely escaped notice in prestige languages like Khmer, Mon and Vietnamese. Their formation is a fully productive process only in nonliterate societies, where expressives constitute a third major form-class comparable in magnitude to nouns and verbs…. Unlike the classes of nouns and verbs, which are ‘ lexically discrete ’ (Diffloth ’ s term), expressives are lexically non-discrete, in that they are subject to a virtually unlimited number of semantic nuancings that are conveyed by small changes in their pronunciation.