Chapter 6

Aoj ‘give’ in Khmer

In this example we find three verbs in a row which all serve to describe a single macro-event (an event of transfer), which gets decomposed in Khmer into three subevents: “taking the soup, going somewhere with it and giving it to the dog.” This pattern of lexicalization is particularly frequent for verbs describing a path of motion, and it is often accounted for using both cultural and cognitive principles (Durie 1997, Vittrant 2015); in this chapter we insist on the cognitive and structural (i.e., constructional) aspects of the verb aoj. After providing a summary of the main uses of aoj, our research questions will be the following: the first and most difficult issue is that of categorization; according to the function it fulfills in the clause/sentence, aoj is called a verb (lexical/main verb, pre-auxiliary verb, causative verb, modal verb, etc.), a preposition, a conjunction, etc. We need to look for other types of solutions, and one such solution will be to endorse a constructional treatment (of aoj) in line with Croft (2013)’s proposals. This will in turn allow us to explore an important point raised by Newman (1996) in his extensive study of give verbs, which is that the constructional type of the language (namely, the omnipresence of SVCs) favors the polyfunctionality of aoj, compared to English give or French donner, which are far less polysemous. Finally, we tackle the thorny issue of the meaning contribution of aoj in the constructions it occurs in.