A descriptive grammar of Sgaw Karen

This thesis presents a grammatical description of Sgaw Karen, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken mainly along the border between Myanmar and Thailand, in Southwestern Myanmar, and in the Andaman Islands, as well as overseas in Europe, North America, and Australia. The corpus of data used for the thesis combines primary data collected by the researcher and secondary data collected by other scholars. The primary data comes from speakers representing three different regions: (1) Mawchi–Taungoo, Myanmar, (2) Kayin–Tak (Tak Province in northwestern Thailand, near the border of Kayin State, Myanmar), and (3) Northern Thailand (Mae Hong Son Province). Rather than focusing on one data set, the dissertation considers all collected data and indicates regional variation where applicable. The data is analysed within a functional–typological framework known as Basic Linguistic Theory, a set of functionally-oriented comparative concepts based on extensive previous typological research. The following are some significant results obtained: The sound system of Sgaw Karen, on the segmental level, comprises twenty-seven initial consonants and nine vowels. No final consonants are posited, which sets Sgaw Karen apart from most other Tibeto-Burman languages. Five tones are identified in the three varieties investigated, pronounced differently depending on the region. Morphosyntactically, Sgaw Karen can be described as an isolating language with scarce bound morphology. In the absence of grammatical affixation, the language uses verbs, exhibiting varying degrees of grammaticalization, to express grammatical meanings such as benefaction, aspect, and causation. Additionally, unlike other Tibeto-Burman languages, most of which are verb-final, Sgaw Karen features an SVO constituent order that closely follows the Greenbergian head-initial word order correlations for verb-medial languages (Greenberg 1963; Dryer 2008; Yurayong & Sandman 2023). The overt morphological marking of core arguments found in some Tibeto-Burman languages is also absent in Sgaw Karen. On the other hand, Sgaw Karen has several features associated with the Mainland Southeast Asian (MSEA) language area (Enfield 2005; Enfield & Comrie 2015), such as the use of sentence-final particles, classifiers, relator nouns, and descriptive verbs as clausal modifiers. The thesis is organized as follows: The introductory chapter provides an overview of the sociolinguistic and typological characteristics of Sgaw Karen, along with the theoretical framework and methods used in the analysis. Chapter 2 introduces the Sgaw Karen sound system, followed by Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, which describe noun phrases and basic clauses, respectively. Individual chapters are dedicated to verb serialization (Chapter 5), a primary strategy for expressing various grammatical categories, and elaborate expressions (Chapter 6), a particular type of coordinate compound common in Tibeto-Burman and MSEA languages. Chapter 7 on closed word classes concludes the description of the word classes, followed by a discussion of some major clause-level phenomena in Chapter 8. The three final chapters address sentence level and discourse phenomena: Chapter 9 discusses subordination, Chapter 10 sentence types and final particles, and Chapter 11 information structure. Chapter 12 provides a conclusion and directions for further research.