A grammar of Saek

Abstract

This thesis describes Saek, a Northern Tai language of the Tai-Kadai (Kra-Dai) family, spoken by a few thousand people in Laos and Thailand. It focuses on the Saek variety in four villages of upper Nam Noi area in Nakai, Laos, an isolated area featuring rich small-scale multilingualism.

Based on brand-new, high-quality audio-visual data collected during the author’s monolingual fieldwork, this thesis describes all major grammatical components of Saek, from phonology to syntax, with in-depth analyses of typologically unique phenomena, such as nominal classification systems, sentence-final particles, and expressive forms. What’s more, it pays careful attention to traditionally overlooked aspects in minority-language studies, such as the prosodic system and information structure of Saek.

The thesis also provides a 3000-entry lexicon and a curated selection of fully transcribed, glossed and translated texts (3.25 hours, 550 pages). An index links more than 1000 carefully explicated examples cited to named fieldwork recordings, the majority of which are natural discourse collected from a wide range of social settings in the village life.