Nouns, verbs and syntactic backsliding in Khmer

One of the difficulties in parsing Khmer is that morphosyntactic clues about the category membership of words are either lacking or misleading. In particular, words which seem to have the status of deverbal nominalizations because of a derivational infix -Vm(n)- are in fact “still”functioning as verbs. It may be that this phenomenon of “syntactic backsliding” provides novel evidence for the hypothesis that this infix was originally meaningless, and that infixation arose in Khmer via the process of “secretion”.