Grammaticalisation in Burmese: Nominalisation, Focus and Case particles in historical and typological perspective

One of the most striking features of modern spoken Burmese is the ambiguity of nominalized verb forms (ha) which can occur as nominal arguments of a verb as well as in sentence final position with the function of a finite verb. Another notoriously difficult phenomenon is the ambiguity of nominal particles (kou, ka) which can either mark the thematic role of a nominal argument similar to case particles or which can mark emphasis without any thematic specification. The same kind of ambiguities with nominalized verb forms and nominal particles are documented in Lahu and other Tibeto-Burman languages of Southeast Asia. However, in the reference grammars and dictionaries that are available for Burmese and Lahu these ambiguities are treated as categorically different and mutually unrelated phenomena. In a historical syntactic analysis which treats syntactical ambiguities as signs of a grammaticalization process, I argue that both phenomena are systematically interrelated. Drawing on a parallel development which can be found in Japanese I will show that today's case marking function of kou and finite verb particle de is a grammaticalized form of an old Burmese focus construction with kou as focus marking particle and thi as nominalized ver