Grammatical typology sketches and their application to Thai, Vietnamese and Japanese

Abstract

In his introduction, the author recalls the the principles of linguistic typology as exposed by Spier, BREENBERG, USPENSKIJ; he criticizes LIEM's contrastive presentation of Thai and Vietnamese at the clause level , he sums up LEHMANN's finding of an order-law linking verbal bases to modality in the OV and OV groups of languages, he outlines the methodological orientation which inspires the present typology sketches: as far as possible, comparison ought to be based on whole grammatical systems, instead of being based on arbitrarily isolated patterns.

In the sections of chapetr  Nr 2,3,4 , one finds grammatical abstracts containing identical instances from Thai , Vietnamese and Japanese.

As a conclusion , the author attemps to present a non-trivial registre of typical points which come out of the comparison between the three languages involved.He particularly lays stress on the relationship which links together emphasis , inversion, and nominalisation.