Year: 2007Publisher: Mouton de Gruyter, BerlinAuthor: N. J. Enfield Lao is the national language of Laos, and is also spoken widely in Thailand and Cambodia. It is a tone language of the Tai-Kadai family (Southwestern Tai branch). Lao is an extreme example of the isolating, analytic language type. This book is the most comprehensive grammatical…

Year: 2006Publisher: Berg Publishers, OxfordEditors: N. J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson This book marks an exciting convergence towards the idea that human culture and cognition are rooted in the character of human social interaction, which is unique in the animal kingdom. Roots of Human Sociality attempts for the first time to explore the underlying…

Year: 2003Publisher: Routledge, LondonAuthor: N. J. Enfield This important new study examines in detail a semantic-pragmatic pattern surrounding the basic verb ‘acquire’ in nearly 30 Southeast Asian languages, concentrating on Lao, Vietnamese, Khmer, Kmhmu, Hmong, and varieties of Chinese. The book makes a significant contribution to empirical work on semantic and grammatical change in a…

Year: 2002Publisher: Oxford University Press, OxfordEditor: N. J. Enfield This book provides a fresh and original approach to the ‘ethnosyntax’ concept – the proposition that the grammar of a language is intimately linked to the culture of its speakers. It focuses on three related questions: how far culture accounts for linguistic variation; how culture and…