Syntactic and Semantic Boundness of Noun Phrases in Burmese

This paper investigates the correlation of form and function in Burmese noun phrases. Burmese has several ways of combining nouns with verbal and other modifiers, which exhibit different degrees of syntactic boundness and semantic integration. The claim is that syntactic and semantic boundness are predictive in that syntactically more tightly bound expressions coincide with closer semantic integration. The results show that this claim partly holds in Burmese, though it is not the only factor determining the choice of a specific construction in a given context.