Abstract
From a typological perspective, the most striking — and perhaps the only noteworthy — feature of the auxiliation of the main verb baan 'get' in Khmer is that it migrates from V2 to V1 position, contravening the general tendency for grammatical morphemes to remain frozen in the same position where the words from which they originate are found. It may be that the reason for this migration is, ultimately, prosodic: Khmer is an iambic language; hence, it is an exclusively prefixing language; and hence it is a language in which unstressed elements are attracted into some prefixed position. It is possible that Wackernagel's Law, following which unstressed elements are attracted into a suffixing position (typically, sentence-second) may be a typological parameter, rather than a universal. In exclusively prefixing languages like Khmer, which are admittedly very rare, the corresponding migration may be into initial position.
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