Download or read book A Grammar of Lao written by N.J. Enfield and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lao is the national language of Laos, and is also spoken widely in Thailand and Cambodia. It is a tone language of the Tai-Kadai family (Southwestern Tai branch). Lao is an extreme example of the isolating, analytic language type. This book is the most comprehensive grammatical description of Lao to date. It describes and analyses the important structures of the language, including classifiers, sentence-final particles, and serial verb constructions. Special attention is paid to grammatical topics from a semantic, pragmatic, and typological perspective.