Lexique/grammaire. Le cas du khmer

Abstract

This article questions the distinction between grammar and the lexicon through a study of four Khmer units, each of them presenting both lexical and grammatical uses, as can be observed in many languages in the world. The distinction between what is lexical and what is grammatical is highly questionable as each unit turns out to have its own distribution and its own combinatory and syntactic constraints. Besides, it is impossible to single out a particular use which could be held as specifically basic.In Indo-European languages, the lexicon/grammar distinction has a certain visibility since two sets of units can be opposed easily enough: an open set, that of the lexicon, and a closed one, that of grammatical units. The use of lexical units for grammatical purposes thus seems to justify the use of the notion of “grammaticalization. But such an inventory proves impossible in Khmer, where categories such as tense, aspect, diathesis, number, etc. do not exist.This article argues that what makes a word’s identity is its very variation, not grammaticalization. Variation is to be understood both in terms of polysemy and of grammatical classification (polycategoriality), all the more so as, as a general rule, a Khmer unit is not linked to one stable category. This leads us to question the very foundations of what is apprehended as a grammatical category.Any language uses units which, in their diversity, can be held as specific representatives of a given category (an illustration of the notion of chreod put forward by Antoine Culioli). Taking into account the various realizations of this category just as they can be observed contributes to deepen the reflection about its foundations. Hence a double movement: from the categories to the forms/markers, and from the forms/markers of a given language to the categories.

Keywords

• lexicon
• Khmer
• grammar
• grammatical category
• word identity
• variation