CLASSIFIERS IN KSINGMUL: TOWARDS ABANDONING THE IDEA OF NON-OBLIGATORYNESS
The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a study of classifiers in Ksingmul, an Austroasiatic language of Vietnam. The corpus comprises 915 sentences, collected during the Russian-Vietnamese fieldwork session of 1979. The article attempts to question some of the persistent views on classifiers in isolating languages of Asia, first - the idea of their non-obligatory nature. The analysis of classifiers used with nouns or nouns with modifiers of different types allows concluding that classifiers function as noun determiners denoting the specific reference status of noun and singularity. The analysis of cases where classifiers are absent shows that they are the examples where the form of specific reference is not required or completely impossible. Taking this into consideration it is argued that classifiers cannot be granted the quality of non-obligatoryness. In other words, there are cases where a classifier is obligatory and cases where it cannot be used due to several reasons. Thus, for instance, classifiers cannot be used with noun phrases which have predicate or generic status, as well as in cases where the object the noun phrase denotes does not exist in the real world. Classifier absence can also be due to such factors as sentence communicative structure, discourse structure, pragmatic factor of markedness. Moreover, there are examples, when these factors impose restrictions on using classifiers in numeral constructions. It is argued that classifiers proper should be distinguished from “similar” units used in compound derivation. The persistent view that classifiers evolved and function as a noun categorization device reflecting how people classify objects according to their external visible features is subjected to doubt.