SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The introductory chapter includes a short account of the author and his novel Nga Ba, with a brief study on the development of the Burmese novel. It also includes the type of transliteration used, and a statement about the theories on which this thesis is based. The second chapter describes the types of sentences, i.e. Simple, Complex and Compound Sentences and their constituents, i.e. dependent clauses, independent clauses; sentence final particles or clusters of particles together with the sentence final intonation contours. The third chapter describes the types of clauses, i.e. dependent and independent clauses and their constituents, i.e. noun groups, verb groups and clause markers. The fourth chapter describes the non-basic constituents, i.e. vocatives and exclamations and their structures; and,optional constituents, i.e. adjuncts - locative and temporal adjuncts and their structures. The fifth chapter includes the types of groups, i.e. noun groups and verb groups and their constituents nouns, verbs, post-noun particles and post-verb particles. The sub-types of groups, i.e. co-ordinate noun groups, item appositive noun groups and the verb groups with rank-shifted noun and verb groups as their constituents together with the connectors, suffixes are also included. The sixth chapter discusses words and word-classes, i.e. simple, complex and compound nouns, verbs and particles. Their sub-classes, i.e. pronouns, post-noun particles, post-verb particles, sentence final particles, nominalizing psirticles and interjections are also discussed.