| Description |
Kơho, a Mon-Khmer (Austroasiatic) language, is spoken by an indigenous population of more than 207,000 people located in Lâm Đồng province in the highland region of Vietnam. There are also several thousand additional members of this ethnic group who live in France and the United States (primarily North Carolina). The goal of this dissertation is to describe the Kơho-Sre language in such a manner that it is accessible both to linguists and also to those in the Kơho-speaking community interested in their own language. This grammar-based on a linguistic analysis that is informed by current linguistic theory and best practices in the field-includes phonological, morphological, and syntactic data. A grammatical description of Kơho is needed, in spite of the fact that a literature of the language does exist. This is because (1) adequate documentation is not achieved by the extant literature; (2) materials are dated and do not reflect recent advances in typology and linguistic analysis; (3) many materials are published in Russian and Vietnamese or are not readily available to most researchers; and (4) earlier descriptions are cast in frameworks that are not amenable to contemporary documentary linguistic analysis. This dissertation, based on data collected during fieldwork in Vietnam and North Carolina, supplemented with previously published syntactic and lexicographic materials, provides an overview of the grammatical structure of Sre. Sre is a polysyllabic (usually dissyllabic) language with a synchronic tendency towards reduction of the presyllable (the weaker or minor syllable) and development in the remaining (main or major) syllable of contrastive pitch characteristics associated with vowel length. Vowel length, in turn, is influenced by the main syllable coda. A formerly complex system of nominal classifiers (operating in the pattern: numeral + classifier + noun) has been reduced to three generally used classifiers. Sentence structure is subject + verb + object with a fairly rigid word order with some phrase or clause movement to indicate certain syntactic functions. |
