Research On Lao Instrumental Prepositions

Lao instrumental prepositions are here defined as a part of speech that can represent one or more kinds of Instrumental Semantics（tool,material,manner,basis and accompanying）in the form of a single preposition.Such prepositions are rich in meaning and complicated in terms of their usages,and have always been the focus of and difficulty in Lao teaching and learning.However,there has been a lack of related research in China.Therefore,based on the statistics of relative corpus samples,and in combination with the synchronic and diachronic researches on Lao and its related languages as well as modern linguistics theories,this paper attempts to analyze the origins of Lao instrumental prepositions,their original meanings,and other problems concerning the grammaticalization of Lao instrumental prepositions,and clarify their grammatical meanings and syntactic environments to further explore the general rules and internal relations of such prepositions in terms of grammaticalization,semantics,form and syntax.This paper first brings forward the concept of "instrumental prepositions" to define Lao instrumental prepositions,and then takes seven single instrumental prepositions which are （?） as the main research objects.Based on the statistical analysis of 2979 sentences in the corpus,it can be concluded that the seven words mentioned above contain a total of thirteen semantic types,and the words have various degrees of grammaticalization.With the help of the prototype theory,the semantic category of instrumental prepositions can be viewed as a prototype category,and the earlist and most fundamental meaning of a preposition can be viewed as its prototypical meaning.In accordance with the prototypical meaning,the instrumental prepositions can be divided into three types: means type,concomitant type and space type.Secondly,this paper takes each type of prepositions as a research unit,and studies them from the semantic perspective.The three types of instrumental prepositions can separately represent twelve,nine,and four kinds of semantic types,while relationships between prototypical meaning and other semantic types can be construed by the focal adjustment mechanism.At the level of semantics,the instrumental meaning is the prototypical and central meaning within the semantic category of instrumental prepositions.Other semantics gradually move away from the prototypical meaning as their semantic relations with the prototype meaning become loose.With regard to prepositions,each preposition is presented in semantic categories to different typical degrees due to different amounts of semantic types,especially those of the types of instrumental semantics they contain.It is also pointed out that in the process of semantic expansion,the extended meaning may replace the prototypical meaning as the most commonly used semantic type of a preposition.The preposition which has higher degree of grammaticalization usually contains more semantics types.A semantic type internally also has typical and atypical members,and there may be crossings between different semantic types.Thirdly,this paper studies instrumental prepositions from the perspective of syntactic environment with three parameters: prepositional independence,syntactic constituents and word order of prepositional phrases.The syntactic environment of Lao instrumental prepositions can also be regarded as a prototype category.The prototype of this category is characterized by single prepositions being used as the main form,high independence,prepositional phrases located after their central modified predicates as adverbials.Most of the members’ syntax characteristics are close to the characteristics above,though different in degree of proximity,and they are regarded as relatively typical members of the category.The members which have relatively greater difference with the prototype（including those far away from）are regarded as atypical members of the category.In addition,the applicability of single Lao instrumental prepositions is higher than that of compound prepositions,posterior language units less limited and syntactic positions of the prepositional phrases generally less stable than that of compound prepositions.Besides,the syntactic positions of prepositional phrases as adverbials are not as stable as when acting as attributives.Finally,combining studies from semantic and syntactic perspectives,this paper finds that within the categories of Lao instrumental prepositions,the typicality of semantics are synchronous with that of syntactic environments to some extent.In general,differences in terms of typical degrees are more obvious in semantics than in syntax.