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18th
Himalayan Languages Symposium
10-12 September 2012
Department of Linguistics
Banaras Hindu Universitya
ABSTRACT BOOKLET
Editing
ANIL THAKUR
&
SANJUKTA GHOSH
Editorial Assistance
SHAILENDRA KUMAR
Department of Linguistics
Banaras Hindu University
Varanasi – 221005
INDIA
September 2012
18th
Himalayan Languages Symposium
A Brief Outline
The idea of hosting a Himalayan Languages Symposium at Banaras Hindu University was first
explored at the 13th
Himalayan Languages Symposium held at IIAS, Shimla in 2007, where we
were participants. Many point were discussed that made Varanasi and particularly BHU a
potential venue. Professor George van Driem and Professor JC Sharma suggested that since there
is a Linguistics Department at Banaras Hindu University and we were working in this area that
Banaras Hindu University should host the symposium. Some other points were: that
Central University of Tibetan Studies at Sarnath is located in the city and there could be very
good collaborative efforts in form of co-organizing the Event or exchange of expersise in this
area; Varanasi as a city of spiritual, historical and academic significance is loved as a tourist-
destination by a large number of tourists (including international tourists) and several researchers
working on the Himalayan languages want to visit the city along with participating in the
symposium; Banaras Hindu University has several departments such as Departments of Indian
Languages (Nepali), History of Art, Archeology and other language departments that could
jointly organize the Event since there are a number of common research issues across these
disciplines. We were a bit reluctant because as junior faculty we were quite aware of the degree
of interdisciplinary interactions at Banaras Hindu University, particularly in the Faculty of Arts
and the kind of responsibility that involved in organizing such an Event. However, we decided to
explore the possibility and after coming back we talked to our senior colleagues in the
Department and we also explored the possibility of having Central University of Tibetan Studies
at Sarnath as a co-organizer. However, despite our efforts we could not convince the later to join
us for the Event. We got very positive response from our colleages here and that made us
confident enough to organize the Event at BHU. In the meanwhile, Professor George van Driem
had been motivating us for the BHU to say yes to his proposal. We could funally decide in 2011
to host the 18th
Himalayan Languages Symposium at the Department of Linguistics, Banaras
Hindu University. Keeping with the tradition and emerging trends in the area of linguistics
research we invited research papers from researchers working on different aspects of language,
culture, art, anthropology, archaeology and prehistory of the great Himalayan regions. We are happy that
we received a very good response from the researchers from across several countries in the form of
approximately eighty abstract submissions. Except only a few, the submissions were of a very high
quality and reflected on ongoing research questions in contemporary linguistics. Besides, we have been
very fortunate in getting supports and guidance from Professor George van Driem, Professor Uday
Narayan Singh, and Professor Anvita Abbi in form of keynote and special lectures in their respective field
of expersise. We are very fortunate in getting continuous and expert patronage from our Honorable Vice
Chancellor Professor Lalji Singh, who has always encouraged and enlightened us by pointing out the
interdisciplinary nature of linguistics research and the significant role that serious linguistics research can
play in understanding genetics research. This is the culmination of a long discussion, waiting, and
efforts and hence a big moment for us.
Linguistic research in India has not fully percolated to all the parts of the country despite the fact
that there have been genuine efforts at several times and Indian subcontinent exhibits a rich
linguistic diversity. This linguistic diversity has a significant role in understanding and
maintaining life-sustaining diversity across all aspects of human life including bio- and cultural-
diversity. The Himalayan regions are not only a source of our ecology and environment but may
also reflect upon our linguistic roots. A large number of researchers are working on different
aspects of linguistics research in a very inter- and multi- disciplinary way on languages of the
Himalayan regions. This is reflected in a number of research papers and volumes that not only
touch but go very deep in the interdisciplinary issues such as languages and genes, language and
(pre)history, culture, art and ecology, besides issues of grammar, structure and meanings.
Language endangerment and language planning is another urgent issue that has a big relevance
in relation to the languages of the Himalayan regions.
The research papers to be presented during the three-day symposium will cover all these issues
and enlighten us about both what is going on and what ought to be done in the area of Himalayan
languages research. We thank all the guest speakers and delegate participants for their support
and also bearing with our limitations.
Anil Thakur
Sanjukta Ghosh
CONTENTS
Keynote Address
A Himalayan Task PROFESSOR UDAYA NARAYANA SINGH
Special Lectures
1. Between the Himalayas and the Ganges: Ancient thoroughfare for the peopling of the
Orient
PROFESSOR GEORGE VAN DRIEM
2. Traces of prehistoric human language structure found in the Great Andamanese
language
PRPFESSOR ANVITA ABBI
Research Papers: Presentation
1. A Preliminary Analysis of Tone in Lamjung Yolmo
LAUREN GAWANE & AMOS TEO
2. Phylogenetic Analysis of a few Languages of Assam
PRIYANKOO SARMAH, KALYAN DAS, PAMIR GAGOI, AMALESH GOPE, LUKE
HORO
3. Asian ethnolinguistic population prehistory: Father tongues and lost lineages
GEORGE VAN DRIEM
4. The Semantics of the Existential Verb as Aspectual Marker in Meche
KAZUYUKI KIRYU
5. Classifier Expressions in Kashmiri: A Cognitive Grammar Approach
ACHLA RAINA
6. On the limitation particle sha in Jingpo
LINSHEN ZHANG
7. Four-way Spatial Cases and Deictic Verbs Distinction in Puma (Kiranti)
NARAYAN SHARMA
8. Ethnoarchaeological Investigations among the Hill Karbis of Southern Kamrup, Assam
MANJIL HAZARIKA
9. Properties of discontinuous NUM+CLF in Wa
LARIN ADAMS
10. On the Phonological Forms of Prefixes in Jingpho
KURABE KEITA
11. Transitivity Alternations and Causativisation in Shumcho
CHRISTIAN HUBER
12. Internal Subgrouping of Tibeto-Kinnaur
ANJU SAXENA, LARS BORIN
13. Hierarchical Verb Agreement in Hakhun Tangsa
KRISHNA BORO
14. First Steps towards a Newaric Hypothesis
BEN MULLER
15. Kinship Terminology of the Boro Language
PRANITA DEVI
16. On split-ergativity in Nepali
GUAN YU CHEN
17. Syntax-Pragmatics Interface: A Study of Secondary Agreement
SANJUKTA GHOSH, ANIL THAKUR
18. Through and Beyond the Lexicon: A Semiotic Look at Nepal Sign Language Affiliation
MIKE MORGAN
19. Sentence-final Particles in Dzolo Nàmùyì
FUMINOBU NISHIDA
20. The “R” in Nusu: Approximant or Fricative?
ELISSA IKEDA
21. What do Indian Languages have: DP or NP?
DEEPAK ALOK, SRINIKET MISHRA
22. Deictic Space in Mizo - Interpretations in Discourse
LALNUNTHANGI CHHANGTE
23. Linguistic Affinity between Siraji and Kashmiri: A Morphological perspective
AADIL A KAK, FAROOQ A SHEIKH
24. Deictics in a Northern Dialect of Tamang
TOM OWEN SMITH
25. SV – VS Alternation in Wa
SENG MAI
26. Preliminary Description of Amri Karbi Phonology
AMALESH GOPE, PRIYANKOO SARMAH
27. Linguistic Diversity in Nepal and its Perspective on Inclusive Language Policy
YOGENDRA P YADAV
28. Nature and extent of endangerment in Lepcha
SATRUPA DATTAMAJUMDAR
29. Raji Orthography Development
KAVITA RASTOGI
30. The Ngari Group of Western Tibetan Dialects
BETTINA ZEISLER
31. Determination of the Indeterminate Bare Noun in Karbi
GAUTAM BORAH, RAUJLINE SIRAJ FARJINA AKHATAR
32. Verbal Suffixes in Inpui
W PINKY DEVI
33. Phonological description of Saora and Mundari in Assam
LUKE HORO
34. The prosody of contrastive focus in Bodo
SHAKUNTALA MAHANTA, KALYAN DAS
35. Referential Hierarchies in the Kashmiri Languages
SAARTJE VERBEKE
36. Language Use and Documentation of dPa’ ris Amdo Tibetan
SHIHO EBIHARA
37. Spell Checker for Bodo: A Finite-State Automata Approach
RAVIKUMAR RAGAM, BANEESSH N, SHANMUGAM R
38. Sounds and syllables in Koch dialect of Rabha
PRIYANKOO SARMAH, KALYAN DAS
39. Digitizing Language with NLP tools and Technologies: An Overview of Nepali
ATIUR RAHAMAN KHAN
40. Different functions of pu in Leinong Naga
ESTHER WAYESHA
41. Compunding in Dimasa
KH. DHIREN SINGHA
42. Lexicalization of Syntactic patterns
BISHAKHA DAS
43. Distribution of Topic and Focus Particles in Meiteilon
SANATOMBI DEVI
44. Phonological Description of Saora and Mundari in Assam
LUKE HORO
45. Formation of Nominal Stems in Mising
BABY DOLEY, BASANTA DOLEY
46. Khoibu Tone
L BIJENKUMAR SINGH
47. Factors responsible for code-switching in Gulgulia
SNEHA MISHRA
48. Semantics of Genitive Case in Nepali
LAXI NATH KANDEL
49. Diminutives in Western Pahari Languages
JC SHARMA
50. A Comprehensive Grammar of Aka
SK BANERJEE
51. Negative Word Acts in Positive Mood: A Comparative Study between Bangla and
Nepali
RG DASTIDAR, S MUKHOPADHYAY
52. Manipuri Reflexive suffix -cə
H SURMANGOL SHARMA
53. Wanchoo Language Field Notes
SR SHARMA
54. Aspects of the Phonology of Himalayan Languages
RAJNATH BHAT
Key-Note Address
A Himalayan Task
UDAYA NARAYANA SINGH
Visva-Bharati, Shantinikatan, India
Keynote is about saying the right words in the right perspective, and the figurative sense of
"leading idea" is from 1783, whereas the term keynote address is dated 1905, thanks to the
American incarnation of the English language. The task seems to be difficult for one who did
attend or organize some of these symposia (in Uppsala and Mysore) but is not a regular worker
in this field. And, therefore, the address tries to voice some of my concerns vis-à-vis this grand
idea of establishing the tradition of Himalayan languages scholarship firmly in India. In this talk,
only four or five observations are made and suggestions offered for consideration.
First, the Himalayan Languages Symposium (http://www.himalayansymposium.org/) began its
journey in 1995 in Leiden - thanks to a few enthusiasts located in various European countries,
and reaches its 18th
edition this year at Varanasi. In between, it has traveled to numerous venues
– at least thrice to USA, once in the United Kingdom and twice in the Nordic countries – in
Swedish venues such as Göteborg (2007) and Uppsala (2001) as well as in other parts of Europe
- Netherlands at Noordwijkerhout (1996) and in Switzerland (Berne, 2002). HLS has also moved
to East Asia in Japan (2011) and Thailand (2005). In the SAARC countries, where the serene
presence of the Himalayas inspires one to devote attention to these very special linguistic zones,
HLS in Kathmandu (2006) in Nepal and Thimphu (2004) in Bhutan offered exciting destinations
for researchers. Every fourth or fifth year, however, the circuit has travelled to various parts in
India – Deccan College, Pune (1998), CIIL, Mysore (2003), IIAS, Shimla (2007) and now in the
sprawling historical BHU campus in Varanasi (2012). While the movement entirely depended on
the prime movers and the locally available enthusiasts, it has actually been held in the Himalayas
only thrice – in Nepal, Bhutan and in Shimla – Himachal Pradesh in India. My first suggestion to
the community of scholars engaged in working on the Himalayan languages will be to ensure
that the event happens at least once in two years in a space within the Himalayan region, whereas
in the other and alternate year, it could be held in the universities and institutions interested in
this area studies. The choice of a Himalayan venue could be distributed keeping many emerging
universities and institutions in diverse locations – including Sikkim University (Gangtok,
Sikkim), G.B. Pant University (Pantnagar, Uttaranchal), HNB Garhwal University (Srinagar,
Pauri Garhwal, Uttaranchal), Gurukul Kangri University (Haridwar, Uttaranchal), Tripura
University (Agartala, Tripura), Assam University (Silchar, Assam), Tezpur University (Tezpur,
Assam), Rajiv Gandhi University (Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh), Guwahati and Dibrigarh
Universities (in Assam) with long-standing experience in working on the Himalayan languages,
and of course in those universities in the Himalayas with Linguistics departments such as the
NEHU (Shillong, Meghalaya), Manipur University (Imphal, Manipur), etc. The regional IITs
(Roorkee in Uttaranchal, and Guwahati in Assam) and the NITs (Silchar, Assam) with some
interest in computational linguistics should also be involved to broaden the base.
Secondly, there has been another problem that has actually hampered serious research in the
field, and that has to do with sensationalizing linguistic works through media – such as the PTI
coverage in 2010 titled ‘Hidden language discovered in Northeast’ published on 7th
October
DNA News (http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_hidden-language-discovered-in-
northeast_1448948) about Koro, or this PPC news dated Nov 1, 2010 from Sweden telling us
about a lady, Yasmin Mullah, 38 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zVtNMApnC4) who
migrated from Sudan and who could easily handle sixty-four languages, or, the announcement by
the Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology (Zentrum für Baltische und Skandinavische
Archaölogie) that found the oldest evidence of the West Germanic Language in a runic
inscription on a comb dating back to 300 AD (http://www.zbsa.eu/news/news-2012/oldest-
evidence-of-westgermanic-language). Many of these pronouncements about human languages,
including the hullabaloo about 196 Indian languages facing threat of extinction – a news widely
aired by all channels and covered by many newspapers and magazines in India – raise
possibilities of debate that never happen. The Press Trust of India had posted a news item to this
effect on Saturday, Feb 21, 2009. This was immediately carried out in many newspapers and was
also discussed in the Indian parliament. Even on May 17, 2010, the Indian Express reported that
“three months after one of India’s many endangered languages went silent after the death of its
lone speaker from the ‘Bo’ tribe in Andaman, the Union Human Resource Development (HRD)
Ministry has woken up to the threat of near 190 Indian languages becoming extinct — as warned
by the UNESCO Atlas of World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing”, etc. Interestingly, the
issue is still alive as could be seen in the Financial Express and Outlook magazine of 29th
August
2012. While this had made news, there was not much serious debate about the work or the claims
or the consequences.
Thirdly, although we are aware that a number of HLS volumes did come out in published form,
we do not see these volumes being properly reviewed in South Asian professional journals,
yearbooks and other fora. Somehow, the serious debates on the analysed languages that used to
happen earlier have subsided now, and I would appeal to the younger research students in the
universities to take these volumes as points of beginning, and go further on these languages
under report. Otherwise, the scholarship in the field would not go anywhere from where one
began in 1995.
Fourthly, much to my surprise, I see practically no serious digital/video/audio-video
documentation and archive of the languages spoken in the Himalayan region, except for the 49
documentaries made on the eleven languages of Sikkim by the CIIL, Mysore in 2008-09. This is
an area we need to emphasize on – both for facilitating the researchers and for posterity.
Fifthly, I must say something about the multi-disciplinarity of the field, and what we are not
doing at the moment. Although the organizers of HLS had quite wisely thought about opening
the future events to allied fields as well when they announced that “In addition to linguistic
presentations, contribution are also welcome from related disciplines such as history,
anthropology, archaeology and prehistory” (http://www.himalayansymposium.org/himalayan-
languages-symposium), the discipline of Himalayan Studies has still not gained recognition or
currency in the 419 universities that this country has. Among the universities I find only a few
universities devoting serious attention to this field; e.g., the North-Bengal University has
established a five-member Centre for Himalayan Studies and the central university in Sikkim, or
the Sikkim University floated a few programmes in Himalayan Studies such as MSc Sustainable
Mountain Development, or MSc Mountain & Rural Management or MA Indigenous Languages
[Bhutia, Lepcha, Rai, Limboo, Tamang and others]. But the number of such endeavours would
be very few. In other universities in the region, one gets to see some narrow-focus centres,
departments or schools, such as Centre for Excellence in Biodiversity in Rajib Gandhi
University, Itanagar (Arunachal Pradesh), Centre for Myanmar Studies and Centre for Manipur
Studies in Manipur University, Imphal (Manipur), Department of Disaster Management in
Tripura University, Agartala (Tripura), Department of Botany specialising on Environmental
Studies and Conservation and Forest Biotechnology or a Department of Teniyedi in Nagaland
University (Nagaland), etc. It is a different matter that some central government agencies have
taken up serious studies of this region from some specified or multiple angles, and in this context
one could mention Survey of India (Dehradun, Uttaranchal), Wadia Intitute of Himalayan
Geology (Dehradun), National Geo-Physical Research Institute (Hyderabad), Indian Institute of
Geomagnetism (Mumbai) with DST funding. Surprisingly, the Ministry of Culture, Government
of India has no institution for the study of Himalayan culture as a whole. The north-western
Regional Office of the Anthropological Survey of India, located at Dehradun, has concentrated
on the studies of Himalayan Communities. It has also collected artifacts of various communities
in Himalayas and is assisting the Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya at Bhopal in collection from
selected communities. But there are some other efforts worth-mentioning, such as the G.B. Pant
Institute of Himalayan Environment and Development, Kosi-Katarmal, Almora which is an
autonomous Institute of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India. But
there is very little that is happening on the Himalayan languages. One needs to bring back the
tradition set up by scholars and enthusiasts such as Brian Houghton Hodgson (1800-1894) who
would be interested in Himalayan languages, culture, religion as well as in the Himalayan
Ornithology and natural history. Today, there are many newly emerging areas that linguists
working on the Himalayas have to deal with or dabble in, including Geo-Politics, Bio-Diversity
and Natural Resource Management, Cultural Landscaping, Migration and Movement Studies,
etc. Some enterprising efforts have seen creation of interesting platforms such as the HLS or the
Centre for Himalayan Studies Blog (http://himalayas.hypotheses.org/category/himalayas). What
is badly needed is a well-planned concentrated efforts on behalf of scholars in the field,
education managers, cultural and thought leaders of the Himalayan region, local and central
governments as well as international communities to come together to establish Himalayan
Studies as a serious multi-disciplinary subject so that we have a trained manpower to undertake
appropriate studies of this large region with difficult terrain and varied culture and life-patterns.
The time is ripe for making a demand from the academic platforms such as the HLS for the
same.
Special Lectures
Between the Himalayas and the Ganges
Ancient thoroughfare for the peopling of the Orient
GEORGE VAN DRIEM
Universität Bern, Switzerland
The 18th Himalayan Languages Symposium is being hosted this year by Banaras Hindu
University on the banks of the Ganges. The 4th, 9th and 13th symposia were hosted in Pune in
1998, Mysore in 2003 and Shimla in 2007. India has hosted more Himalayan Languages
Symposia than any other country. The hosting of our conference at beautiful venues is
commensurate with India’s importance in research on undocumented languages, grammatical
phenomena, linguistic typology and the ethnolinguistic prehistory of the Himalayas. Far greater
and far older than India’s scholarly prowess in the field today is the pivotal role of the Indian
subcontinent in the ethnolinguistic prehistory and peopling of Eurasia. The world’s most
populous and economically most important language families are represented in India. For all of
these language families, the subcontinent served either as a major staging area in prehistory, and
for some linguistic phyla the Indian subcontinent may have been the cradle. After a brief
overview of India’s language families, a reconstructed prehistory of the Trans-Himalayan
language family will be presented. The rationale behind the renaming of this major linguistic
phylum will be outlined. The seminal role of the Indian subcontinent in the prehistory of Trans-
Himalayan language communities will be explained.
Traces of prehistoric human language structure found in the Great
Andamanese language
ANVITA ABBI
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
Great Andamanese is an endangered and moribund language which is spoken by the Great
Andamanese tribes who were hunter and gather till the middle of the 20th
century. Their
language has retained structures which appear to be relics of prehistoric human language/s. The
Great Andamanese conceptualize their world through the interdependencies of inalienable seven
body divisions or classes, each represented by a bound morpheme or a marker. The semantics of
the body division markers pervade the lexical and grammatical system of the language in such a
way that almost all content words in the language are obligatorily preceded by body division
class markers. The system is unique as no language known so far attests such features. As the
Great Andamanese tribes are remnants of the first migration out of Africai and have lived in
isolation till the middle of the 19th
Centuryii, the structures found in the language give us
evidences about the possible grammar used by the early humans.
i Thangaraj, K., Gyaneshwer Chaubey, Toomas Kivisild, Alla G. Reddy, Vijay Kumar Singh,
Avinash A. Rasalkar, Lalji Singh. 2005. Reconstructing the origin of Andaman Islanders.
Science 308: 996.
ii Kashyap, V.K., Sitalaximi, T., Sarkar, B.N., Trivedi, T., 2003. Molecular relatedness of the
aboriginal groups of Andaman and Nicobar Islands with similar ethnic populations.
International Journal of Human Genetics. 3(1): 5-11 (2003).
Research Papers
A Preliminary Analysis of Tone in Lamjung Yolmo
LAUREN GAWANE
The University of Melbourne, Australia
AMOS TEO
Australian National University, Australia
Yolmo (also known as Yohlmo, Hyolmo, and Helambu Sherpa) is a Tibeto-Burman language of
the Central Bodic group, related to Sherpa and Standard Tibetan. The main dialect of Yolmo is
spoken in the Helambu and Melamchi valley area of Sindhupalchok District in central Nepal. In
contrast, the Lamjung dialect of Yolmo is an isolated dialect spoken in five villages of the
Lamjung district in the west-central part of Nepal. The two dialects are said to have diverged a
little under a century ago, when speakers from the Melamchi area migrated to Lamjung (Gawne
2011).
In this paper, we will make some preliminary observations of the tone system of the Lamjung
dialect. These observations will be supported by new acoustic data that suggest that the tone
system of the Lamjung dialect has a contrast in pitch height (high vs. low), but not in pitch shape
(e.g. level vs. falling). Furthermore, the contrast in pitch height is not always associated with a
difference in phonation type (e.g. modal vs. breathy). This would set it apart from the Melamchi
dialect, which has been analyzed as having four phonemic tones: low falling; low level; high
falling and high level, and where the low tones correlate with breathy voice (Hari 2010).
Apart from a comparison between the tone system of the Lamjung dialect and what has been
described for the Melamchi dialect, we will also consider the relationship between Yolmo and
Kyirong Tibetan, as well as the potential influence of Tamang on Lamjung Yolmo.
References
Gawne, L. (2011). Lamjung Yolmo - Nepali - English dictionary. Melbourne, Custom Book
Centre, The University of Melbourne.
Hari, A. M. (2010). Yohlmo Sketch Grammar. Kathmandu, Ekta books.
Phylogenetic Analysis of a few Languages of Assam
PRIYANKOO SARMAH, KALYAN DAS, PAMIR GAGOI
AMALESH GOPE, LUKE HORO
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India
Computational historical linguistics and phylogenetic estimates have recently been of interest to
linguists in general. Gray and Atkinson (2003) have taken help of phylogenetic networks to
support the Anatolian theory of the origin of Indo-Eurpean languages. Similar attempts have
been made using phylogenetic methods to investigate Austronesian languages (Gray and Jordan
2000) and Bantu languages (Holden and Gray 2006).
Drawing from methods described in Johnson (2008), in the current study we attempt to construct
phylogenetic trees for several languages spoken in Assam that belong to two major language
families, namely, Tibeto-Burman and Austro Asiatic. In the current study we collected Swadesh
lists of nine Bodo-Koch languages (Atong, Bodo, Dimasa, Garo, Koch-Rabha, Kok-Borok,
Rabha and Tiwa) of the Tibeto-Burman family. Swadesh lists of 207 words for three Austro
Asiatic languages (Mundari, Saora or Sora and Santhali) as spoken in Assam and in central
Indian were collected. These lists were prepared from various sources and from an online
dictionary website (www.xobdo.org). After that the word lists were compared and clustered
based on shared vocabulary using the method described in Johnson (2008) using the R program.
Subsequently, a cladistic analysis was conducted using the Phylogeny Inference Package
(Felsenstein 1993). This paper summarizes the results of the clustering and hopes it will open a
new area of research in Tibeto-Burman and Austro Asiatic languages.
References
Felsenstein, J. 1993. PHYLIP (Phylogeny Inference Package) version 3.5c. Distributed by the
author. Department of Genetics, University of Washington, Seattle.
Gray, R. D. and Atkinson, Q. D. (2003) Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian
theory of Indo-European origin. Nature, 426(6965):435-439.
Gray, R.D. and F.M. Jordan. (2000) - Language trees support the express-train sequence of
Austronesian expansion. Nature, 405, 1052-1055.
Holden, C. J. and Gray, R. D. (2006) Rapid Radiation, Borrowing and Dialect Continua in the
Bantu Languages. In Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew, editors, Phylogenetic Methods and
the Prehistory of Languages.
Johnson, K. (2008) Quantitative Methods in Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Asian ethnolinguistic Population Prehistory: Father Tongues and Lost
Lineages
GEORGE VAN DRIEM
Universität Bern, Switzerland
A proto-language can only be reconstructed on the basis of linguistic evidence, and the linguistic
ancestors of a modern language community were not necessarily the same people as the
community’s biological forebears. Keeping such caveats in mind, a reconstruction of the
ethnolinguistic population prehistory of eastern Eurasia will be advanced on the basis of
linguistic and human genetic phylogeography, linguistic palaeontology and other evidence. The
model assumes the veracity of the Father Tongue hypothesis, whereby a probabilistic correlation
is frequently, but not always, found to obtain between the Y chromosomal haplogroups prevalent
in a language community and their language, whilst some ancient tongues and paternal lineages
must have gone extinct. This interdisciplinary model of prehistory rests upon a transparently
articulated argument structure consisting of discrete testable subsidiary hypotheses based on
facts from diverse disciplines. The model to be presented in Benares refines the 2009 Salaya and
2011 Paris reconstructions (van Driem 2011, 2012a, 2012b), incorporates new evidence (e.g.
Chaubey et al. 2010, Hazarika 2011, Rasmussen et al. 2011) and presents an improved narrative
of the ethnolinguistic prehistory of the peopling of eastern Eurasia.
The Semantics of the Existential Verb as Aspectual Marker in Meche
KAZUYUKI KIRYU
Mimasaka University, Japan
This paper discusses the semantics of the existential verb doŋ as the final element of verbal
compound. The existential verb is pronounced as -dəŋ when it is used as an aspectual marker and
adds aspectual senses to the main verb of a verb complex. It typically marks an on-going state or
resultant state depending on verbs, as in (1) and (2). It also expresses some Perfect senses, as in
(3), (4) and (5).
(1) ram=a haba mau-dəŋ.
Ram=NOM work do-ST
‘Ram is working.’
(2) lauti=ya bai-dəŋ.
stick=NOM be.broken-ST
‘The stick is broken.’
(3) aŋ dasə pəi-dəŋ.
1SG just.now come-ST
‘I have just come.’
(4) aŋ lama=khəu məjaŋ-in nu-dəŋ,
1SG road=ACC well-EMPH see-ST
‘I have seen the road well (so I know the way very well).’
(5) mai=ya gai-dəŋ.
rice=NOM plant-ST
‘(Literally: They have planted rice.) Rice has been planted.’
(2) may not be interpreted as on-going change of state (i.e. imperfective) and only understood as
a resultant situation after the culmination of the situation designated by the verb. Based on the
traditional binary perfective/imperfective distinction (Comrie 1976), the interpretations of -dəŋ in
(1) and (2) sound contradictory: (1) as imperfective and (2) as including a perfective situation. I
discuss that all verbs except the existential verb doŋ, are dynamic in Meche, and that the
fundamental nature of the -dəŋ is stativization (stage level state). In Meche the distinction
between stative and eventive is more fundamental than perfective/imperfective.
Classifier Expressions in Kashmiri: A Cognitive Grammar Approach
ACHLA RAINA
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India
Email: [email protected]
Classifier systems have been studied extensively from a theoretical as well as a typological
perspective (Dixon, 1968; Allen, 1977; Craig, 1986). In the context of South Asian languages,
classifier systems have been shown to have evolved for some of the Tibeto-Burman,
Austroasiatic and Eastern Indo Aryan languages. Kashmiri, a Dardic language, to the best of our
knowledge, has not been studied from this point of view. In this paper, we examine a post
nominal modifier in Kashmiri, which we argue to be a classifier expression. Mass and count
nouns in this language take different post nominal modifiers depending on the semantic
properties of the noun in question. Comprising a small set, these modifier expressions have
corresponding nominal forms as well. In the nominal form, each of these expressions has a
distinctive semantics of its own. But appearing as a modification in the context of another
mass/count noun, these expressions are bleached of some of their nominal semantics, and are
definitely bleached of their formal categorial status. This synchronically attested
grammaticalization process at work on a set of nominals yields the classifier system in Kashmiri.
The classifier expressions comprising this system are thus ‘light’ nouns which can co-occur with
classes of mass/count nouns, categorizing them in terms of their constituent semantic properties
such as shape, material etc. The classifier expressions under investigation here, and indeed
classifiers in general, are proposed to be viewed as schematisations of subsets of semantic
properties. The lexical-grammatical opposition is understood here in terms of a specificity
schematicity continuum as conceptualized in Langacker (1999) and other related work.
References
Allan, K. 1977. "Classifiers", Language 53, pp. 284-310.
Craig, C. (ed.) 1986. Noun Classes and Categorization, John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Dixon, R.M.W. 1968. "Noun Classes", Lingua 21, pp. 104-125.
Langacker, R.W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Volume I, Theoretical
Prerequisites. Stanford University Press.
Langacker, R.W. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, Volume II, Descriptive Application.
Stanford University Press.
Langacker, R.W. 1999. Grammar and Conceptualization. Mouton de Gruyter
On the limitation particle sha in Jingpo
LINSHEN ZHANG
Osaka Prefecture University, Japan
In Jingpo there are three “limitation particles”1: sha, chyu and hkrai. However, of these sha is the
one most widely used and is therefore the sole target of research of this paper. In this paper, we
1 The term has been invented by the author, using Japanese language as a reference. As
further developed the descriptions made in previous research and we arranged the Jingpo
limitation particle sha into 6 types of usage as follows.
1. Cases where sha is attached to nouns and demonstratives
2. Cases where sha is attached to nouns, adjectives and verbs etc. constituting complex
subordinate clauses
3. Cases where sha is attached to “smallness demonstratives”
4. Cases where sha is attached to time expressions representing near past
5. Cases where sha is attached to major noun phrases in conditional clauses
6. Cases where sha is used as an adverb suffix.
Four-way Spatial Cases and Deictic Verbs Distinction in Puma (Kiranti)
NARAYAN SHARMA
SOAS, UK
This paper argues that Puma has not only four-way contrast in locative marking but also in
deictic verbs of motion. The marking of relative altitude in the locative case system and deictic
verbs of motion is unique among the Kiranti languages. The UP-DOWN-LEVEL and
NEUTRAL dimensions are clearly specified in deictic verbs of motions (come and bring but not
go and take) and in spatial cases, which contrast HIGHER, LOWER, SAME-LEVEL or
NEUTRAL-LEVEL. The spatial cases in terms of vertical space marking include locatives,
allatives and ablatives.
The study investigates that locative cases are restricted to only nominals while ablative and
allative cases obligatorily attach after locative and cannot be affixed straight on a nominal, and
these cases never govern case on the nominal they suffix to as the notion of Bickel and Nichols
(2006). This paper examines that Puma has a class of motion verbs come vs go and bring vs take,
and manifests a deictic opposition which is frequently characterized as ‘motion-towards-speaker’
vs ‘motion-away-from-speaker’ in the world’s languages following the notion of Talmy (1991)
and Wilkins & Hill (1995).
Following Ricca (1993) and Fortis & Fagard (2010) I argue that Puma is purely deictic language
like other European languages Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, as they systematically code a
centripetal movement with come and bring which distinguish four-way contrast, but a centrifugal
movement with go and take which are less marked as go and take are not inherently but
pragmatically deictic verbs.
References
Bickel, Balthasar and Johanna Nichols. 2006. Inflectional morphology. In T. Shopen (eds.)
Language typology and syntactic description.
Fortis. M. & A. Fagard.2010. Deixis. Space and language: Leipzig summer school in typology.
Ricca, R.L. (1993) Torus knots and polynomial invariants for a class of soliton equations. Chaos
3, 83-91
noted in the below, it is in previous research (戴庆厦、徐悉艰(1986)) treated as an adverb.
Talmy, L. (1991). Path to realization: A typology of event conflation. Berkeley Working Papers
in Linguistics, 480-519.
Wilkins, D. P., & Hill, D. (1995). When ‘go’ means ‘come’: Questioning the basicness of basic
motion verbs. Cognitive Linguistics(6), 209-259.
Ethnoarchaeological Investigations among the Hill Karbis of Southern
Kamrup, Assam
MANJIL HAZARIKA
Bern University, Switzerland and Indian Archaeological Society, India
Recent archaeological investigations in the foothills of southern parts of Kamrup district of
Assam have revealed several archaeological sites in the hilly slopes which are presently resided
by different ethnic groups like Karbis, Khasis, Tiwas, Garos, etc. The archaeological record
includes Neolithic stone artifacts, pottery, megaliths etc. The Karbis, a Tibeto-Burman linguistic
community still erect megaliths in memories of a deceased person by performing certain rituals
in this region. Megalithic remains found scattered in most parts of Northeast India, especially in
the south of Brahmaputra have been one of the focus of attention; however, we are yet to
understand their chronology due to scanty excavations done so far and lack of datable material
associated with these structures.
The ethnic groups consider the Neolithic stone axes or adzes as thunderstones which are believed
to have fallen down during thunderstorm. They collect these stone artifacts mostly from their
agricultural fields and keep for various magico-religious purpose and consider a heavenly power
responsible for throwing these thunderstones during the rainy season. The Karbis offer puja to
Ithabo or Thengcho, the ‘God of the Sky’, for preventing destructive thunderstorm activities at
their settlements and agricultural fields. These kinds of pujas are practiced with a uniquely
organic material culture; devoid of clay, stone or metal artifacts, finally leaves no or few material
remains at the activity areas. Dependence on organic material in day-to-day life may hint us in
understanding the cause of the scanty nature of archaeological record in these areas.
The objectives of this paper are to analysis the archaeological material recorded and collected
during foot-survey explorations, draw ethnoarchaeological parallels from our study among the
hill Karbis and finally to place the results in a wider context of archaeology of Northeast India.
Properties of discontinuous NUM+CLF in Wa
LARIN ADAMS
Payap University, Thailand
Wa, a Palaungic langauge in Myanmar, shares an interesting phenomenon with other Southeast
(and East) Asian languages whereby a Number+Classifier constituent which modifies a noun can
appear separated from the NP headed by the N it modifies. This ‘discontinuity‘, or ‘floating‘, is
discussed in Simpson (2005) [Thai, Japanese, Burmese], Enfield (2005) [Lao], and Manson
(2010) [Kayan, Geba Karen, Northern Khmer]. Manson suggests that the motivation for this
‘floating‘will be found information theory, but Simpson makes stronger claims. Simpson
suggests that discontinuous NUM+CLF constituents are really adverbial and when used will
either force a partive interpretation (Japanese and Thai) or at least make it available (Burmese
among others).
A recently completed grammar sketch of Wa by Seng Mai (2012) also comments on
discontinuous NUM+CLF phrases. This sketch points outs that in Wa only NPs in the object
position can have their NUM+CLF constituent displaced. It also appears that displaced
NUM+CLF phrases are actually quite common (maybe even preferred) in spoken Wa. Further
investigation shows that displaced NUM+CLF phrases actually have a number of potentional
‘landing spots‘in a sentence. This is a feature they share with a subset of quantifiers. However,
unlike Thai or Burmese, in Wa a partative interpretation is not available from a
‘floated‘NUM+CLF phrase.
This paper explores the phenomena of discontinuous NUM+CLF in Wa and seeks to clarify the
structural limitations on its occurrence, to find similar behavior in other constituents, and to
describe any semantic or pragmatic factors that shed light on why it occurs.
On the Phonological Forms of Prefixes in Jingpho
KURABE KEITA
Kyoto University, Japan
Jingpho is a Tibeto-Burman language with its population 650,000, spoken in Northern
Burma and adjacent areas of China and India. There are a number of prefixes in Jingpho. In
many cases, it is hard to tell the exact functions or definable meanings of these prefixes, but they
occur repeatedly in a great number of disyllabic words and their forms are highly restricted.
For this presentation, all disyllabic words with prefixes listed in Hanson (1906) A
dictionary of the Kachin language were surveyed in an attempt to determine the
phonological forms of the prefixes in this language. The number of such words listed in Hanson
(1906) is approximately 4,000.
The main findings of this survey are as follows: 1) The nucleus vowels of the prefixes are highly
restricted. Most of them are unstressed schwa /ə/ or high vowels /i, u/, although Jingpho has 6
vowel phonemes /i, e, a, o, u, ə/, which occur in the other positions of the words. 2) There are no
prefixes which have consonant clusters as their onset, although Jingpho has two types of
consonant clusters, Cr and Cy. 3) Prefixes with the unstressed schwa as their nucleus, or minor
syllables, are always open syllable. 4) Consonants which occur as the onset of minor syllables
are restricted and some consonant phonemes never occur in this position. 5) The rhymes of the
prefixes with fully stressed vowels are almost always /i/ or /u/ followed by the nasal codas /m/
/n/ or /ŋ/. 6) The forms of the rhymes in fully stressed prefixes are in complementary
distribution. For example, rhymes such as /in/ and /um/ are observed in a vast majority of
prefixes, but rhymes such as /im/ and /un/ never occur in this position.
Transitivity Alternations and Causativisation in Shumcho
CHRISTIAN HUBER
Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria
The language of Shumcho is a West Himalayish Tibeto-Burman language spoken in a handful of
villages in the District Kinnaur of Himachal Pradesh, India. Based on data from fieldwork I will
provide a descriptive account of transitivity alternations and causativisation in Shumcho as
emerging from the presently available data.
I will review various strategies of deriving intransitive or causative versions of verbs and also
deal with phonological, morphological and syntactic issues that become relevant here.
Internal Subgrouping of Tibeto-Kinnaur
ANJU SAXENA
Uppsala University, Sweden
LARS BORIN
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
There is considerable disagreement over the internal classification of the Tibeto-Burman
languages, on all levels of the family tree. For example, to date there has not been any
systematic, comparative linguistic study of the Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in the Indian
Himalayas – the subject of our presentation – and consequently no systematic basis for
examining how these languages relate to one another. Here, we examine the internal
subclassification of 17 Tibeto-Burman languages/varieties spoken in the Indian Himalayan
region – Bhramu, Byangsi, Chaudangsi, Gahri, Ladakhi, Tabo, Tinani, Kunashi, Chitkul, Kalpa,
Kuno, Labrang, Nako, Nichar, Poo, Ropa and Sangla Kinnauri – continuing and extending an
earlier investigation (Saxena and Borin 2011) of the last 9 of these varieties (Chitkul–Sangla
Kinnauri), which are commonly brought together in a subgroup labelled West Himalayish.
The data for the comparison comprise a basic vocabulary list (a revised Swadesh list; Swadesh
1955) for all varieties; an extended IDS list for Sangla, Nako and Tinani (1884 senses); and
selected grammatical constructions. The focus in the presentation will be on the lexical data. The
procedure which we have used for comparing the word lists is similar to recent works in
dialectometry (e.g., Nerbonne and Heeringa 2009) and lexicostatistics (e.g., Holman et al. 2008)
in relying on a completely automatic comparison of the items in the word lists. However, it
differs from most of these works in its usage of rules tailored to the particular set of languages
under investigation, rather than a general method for string comparison. In this respect, it falls
somewhere in between traditional glottochronology – where expert statements are required about
the cognacy of items – and these modern approaches – which rely entirely on surface form for
determining identity of items – although closer to the latter than the former. The main
methodological advantage of our approach is its consistency.
Our investigation shows that Kuno, Nako and Poo should be grouped in the Tibetan subgroup,
and not the West Himalayish subgroup, of the Tibeto-Burman language family. We will also
propose an internal subgrouping of the remaining West Himalayish languages.
References
Eric W. Holman, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Viveka Velupillai, André Müller, and Dik
Bakker. 2008. Explorations in automated lexicostatistics. Folia Linguistica, 42(2):331–354.
John Nerbonne and Wilbert Heeringa. 2009. Measuring dialect differences. In Jürgen Erich
Schmidt and Peter Auer, editors, Language and space: Theories and methods, 550–567.
Mouton De Gruyter, Berlin.
Anju Saxena and Lars Borin 2011. Dialect classification in the Himalayas: a computational
approach NODALIDA 2011 Conference Proceedings, 307–310. Riga: NEALT.
Morris Swadesh. 1955. Towards greater accuracy in lexicostatistic dating. International Journal
of American Linguistics, 21(2):121–137.
Hierarchical Verb Agreement in Hakhun Tangsa
KRISHNA BORO
University of Oregon, USA
Suffixal Verbal agreement is found in a significant number of Tibeto-Burman languages, which
fall under different subgroups, such as Qiangic, West Himalayan, East Bodish, Mizo-Kuki-Chin,
and Bodo-Konyak-Jinghpaw (Delancey, 2010; Morey, 2011). The agreement systems found in
West Himalayan, Kiranti, Gyalrongic, Qiangic, Kham, and Nungish are unanimously considered
to be cognates, and thus reconstructable for a higher level branch. One such proposed higher
level branch is ‘Rung’ (Lapolla, 1992; Thurgood, 1984), although a section of linguists doubt the
existence of such a branch (Delancey, 2010). Agreement systems found elsewhere, such as in
Jinghpaw and Nocte within the Bodo-Konyak-Jinghpaw branch, were initially considered to be
independent innovations (Lapolla, 2003). However, in a later study, DeLancey (2011a) shows
that they are cognates, and thus can be reconstructed at least for the Konyak-Jinghpaw level. In
another study, DeLancey (2010) shows correspondence between the agreement systems found in
the ‘Rung’ branch and Bodo-Konyak-Jinghpaw branch, as well as in Mizo-Kuki-Chin branch
(suffixal agreement) and some other unclassified languages. This leads him to the conclusion that
an agreement system can be reconstructed not only for Proto-Rung but for Proto-Tibeto-Burman,
which has been a matter a debate for a long time (Delancey, 2010; Lapolla, 1992). He provides
plausible explanations, for those TB languages which do not have an agreement system, as to
how an agreement system can be easily shredded from languages under language contact as well
as due to some natural language changing mechanisms, such as nominalization in TB languages
(Delancey, 2011b). Prefixal agreement system is found only within Mizo-Kuki-Chin languages,
and thus regarded as an innovation within that family (Delancey, 2010).
The present study, although does not bear a lot on the ongoing debate on whether or not an
agreement system can be reconstructed for Proto-Tibeto-Burman, contributes to the line of
argumentation taken by DeLancey and others in that it adds another witness in the comparative
study of agreement systems in Tibeto-Burman. Hakhun Tangsa is one of the Konyak languages,
which has a sophisticated agreement system suggestive of considerable time depth, which was
once assumed non-existent (Lapolla, 2003). The agreement system is clearly cognate to those of
Nocte and Jingphaw, and thus forms another witness within Bodo-Konyak-Jinghpaw branch.
The goal of this paper is twofold – to provide a preliminary description of the agreement system
of Hakhun Tangsa (hereafter Hakhun), and offer a comparison between the agreement systems of
Hakhun, Nocte, and Jinghpaw, all of which belong to Bodo-Konyak-Jinghpaw branch.
First Steps towards a Newaric Hypothesis
BEN MULLER
Bern University, Switzerland
In 1992, Georg van Driem proposed a Mahakiranti subgroup, which “consists of at least Kiranti
and Newar” (1992: 245). This hypothesis is still repeated in the Languages of the Himalayas
(2001: 591) although in the very year the handbook appeared he already abandoned this
hypothesis (reported in van Driem, 2004: 413). Although the Mahakirani continues to draw
adherents, the crucial hypothesis to be validated or falsified is the Newaric subgrouping
hypothesis. Based on Turin (2012) and Kansakar & Yadava (2011), I have begun to
systematically analyze the vocabulary of the Baram and Thangmi languages in search of
cognates to discover regular phonological correspondences. This ongoing first exploration has
already begun to uncover hitherto unknown cognate sets and to shed light on the nature of the
phylogenetic relationship which obtains between the two languages. The systematic comparison
with the Newar material is currently in an initial stage, but has already yielded valuable insights.
Kinship Terminology of the Boro Language
PRANITA DEVI
Guwahati University, Kokrajhar Campus, Assam, India
The Boros are originally in Mongoloids groups of Assam in India. They are living in Assam with
their own language and culture. Their language is known to all as a Boro language. They have
their own identity by their own culture. Mainly they are belongs to a patriarchal society. The
effect of the society and culture is apparently on the language. The kinship terminology is a
direct link of language and culture. It is a language phenomenon which is determined by the
social uses in this paper an attempt has been made to describe the use of kinship terminology in
the Boro language. According to Kroebar and Lowie the kinship terminology has distinct
culturally by the following criteria- 1) generation 2) sex 3) affinity 4) collaterality 5) relative age
6) speakers sex and 7) decedence. In Boro society their family systems are nuclear and extended.
The Boro kinship terminology is distinct according to the above criteria. In Boro society the
married son living permanently with their parents. The sons may inherit the parents’ property
and all house hold. Therefore the kinship terminology of the extended family system of the
Boros has some specific characteristic, which has discussed in this paper. Some kinship term are
used as same for both side in some particular relationship. In this study the kinship terminology
of the Boros will be given a picture of the simplicity of the social system.
On split-ergativity in Nepali
GUAN YU CHEN
National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan
There are many scholars talk about the ergativity in Nepali: Abadie (1974) and Verma (1992)
believe that Nepali is a (fully) ergative language, while Klaiman (1987) and Masica (1991)
mention that Nepali is a split-ergative language conditioned by tense/aspect. However, Li (2007)
argues that Nepali is neither as a ergative language nor a split-ergative language. Nepali, in fact,
shows a more complex case-marking pattern.
In my opinion, Nepali is still an ergative language. However, the distribution of the ergative
marker shows a complex pattern in both canonical and non-canonical ways. In canonical
examples, especially in transitive sentences, subjects are ERG in the verb which is in the past
tense or in perfective aspect tense. Otherwise, they are default NOM. However, the patterns of
the distribution of the ergative marker are not detected in the condition of tense/aspect, but in
different type of verb.
With some transitive verbs, such as naac-nu ‘dance’, chalaun-nu ‘drive’, han-nu ‘hit’, dekh-nu
‘see’, the subject may OPTIONALLY take –le. Moreover, Subjects of other transitive verbs such
as khaas-nu ‘fall’, sut-nu ‘sleep’, jaan-nu ‘go’ do not take –le. Furthermore, the intransitive verbs
that allow –le with their subject are her-nu ‘look’, khok-nu ‘cough’, and mut-nu ‘urinate’.
Thus, verbs in Nepali fall into three classed, independently of transitivity: those that, given the
required aspectual conditions, take (i) only NOM subjects, (ii) only ERG subjects, and (iii) either
NOM or ERG subjects.
Syntax-Pragmatics Interface: A Study of Secondary Agreement
SANJUKTA GHOSH, ANIL THAKUR
Banaras Hindu University, India
Email: <[email protected]>
A relation between the secondary agreement and the information structure of the sentence has
been argued in the literature (Dalrymple and Nikolaeva, online paper). This argument can be
extended to explain agreement patterns of different types across languages. The current paper
investigates this issue in detail and proposes a referential feature hierarchy of the referential
expressions of a language, exploiting relevant data from Maithili. Maithili has a wide range of
agreement pattern reflected through an elaborate honorific system (Bickel, Bisang and Yadav
1999; Yadav 1999). Apart from the primary agentive subject-verb agreement, different kinds of
secondary agreement triggers like the objects; possessor of the subject and the objects;
experiencer and locative subjects are also attested in the language. But these syntactic/thematic
roles are not sufficient to explain the agreement triggers. We propose that the expressions which
are higher in the referential feature hierarchy, being more salient in the information structure, are
more capable of becoming triggers for secondary agreement. Second person pronoun or
addressee is at the top of this hierarchy, followed by third person human proper noun/pronoun.
They are always triggers for the secondary agreement as an object, when the subject of the
sentence occurs lower in the hierarchy like the first person pronoun or the third person non-
human common noun, as in (1).
(1) a. nokər hunka bəjəlkən {servant(-hon) him(+hon) called(+hon)} ‘The servant called him.’
b. nokər ahaMke bəjOlək {servant(-hon) you(+hon) called(+hon)} ‘The servant called you.’
In between them, there are Demonstrative followed by Relative pronouns, D-linked Wh-question
words, Quantifiers and Numerals. They being referentially more salient in a discourse than the
3p common nouns/1p pronoun can be triggers from the direct object (2a&b), (3a&b)/possessor of
the subject position (5a&b) but cannot be triggers from the possessor of the object position
(4a&b). The examples below are illustrative.
(2) a. cuTTi ekəra kaTəlkəi {ant(-hon) this(-hon) bit(-hon)} ‘The ant bit this (person).
b. cuTTI hiinka kaTəlkən {ant(-hon) this(+hon) bit(+hon)} ‘The ant bit this (person).’
(3) a. cuTTi jekəra kəTəlkəi {ant(-hon) whom(-hon) bit(-hon)} ‘Whom the ant bit…’
b. cuTTi jinka kəTəlkən {ant(-hon) whom(+hon) bit(+hon)} ‘Whom the ant bit..’
(4) a. toM jekəra beTa-ke dekhəlho {you(mid-hon) whose(-hon) son(-hon) saw(mid-hon}
b. toM jinka beTa-ke dekhəlhi {you(-hon) whose(+hon) son(-hon) saw(-hon)} ‘whose son
you saw.’
(5) a. ekər gəu həra geləi {this.gen(-hon) cow(-hon) lost went(-hon)} ‘This (person’s) cow is
lost.’
b. hinək gəu həra geləin {this.gen(+hon) cow(-hon) lost went(+hon)} . ‘This (person’s) cow is
lost.’
However, the inherently honorific noun mastərsahəb ‘the honorable teacher’ triggers agreement
from the position of the possessor of the object as in 6a and b.
6a. həm mastərsahəb ke gəu ke dekhəliən {I(-hon) teacher(+hon) cow(-hon) saw(+hon)}
‘I saw the cow of the teacher.’
b. həm rəmeS ke gəu ke dekhəliəi. {I(-hon) Ramesh(-hon) cow(-hon) saw(-hon)}
‘I saw the cow of Ramesh.’
In a non-D-linked Wh-Question the agreement is always with the subject who. In short, the
hierarchy is like the following:
2p pronoun> 3p [+human] pronoun/proper noun> 3p [+human] common noun> Demonstrative
pronoun>relative pronoun/D-linked Wh-Question words/quantifiers/ numerals>Non-D-linked
Wh-Qs> 1p pronoun> 3p [-human] common nouns.
References
Bickel, Balthasar, Walter Bisang & Yogendra P. Yadava, 1999. Face vs. empathy: the social
foundations of Maithili verb agreement. Linguistics 37, 481 – 518.
Dalrymple Mary and Irina Nikolaeva. Information structure and secondary agreement. Centre for
Linguistics and Philology, Oxford University. Available online.
Yadava, Yogendra P. 1999. “The Complexity of Maithili Verb Agreement.” Rajendra Singh
(ed.). Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 1999. Delhi et al.: Sage
Publications
Through and Beyond the Lexicon: A Semiotic Look at Nepal Sign
Language Affiliation
MIKE MORGAN
NFDH, Nepal
Nepal Sign Language (NSL) has been described either as a dialect of a greater Indo-Pakistani
Sign Language (Zeshan 2003) or as an independent language belonging to the same family
(Woodward 1993). Unfortunately, little work has been done to date on NSL itself, and the above
two works are based entirely or largely on simple Swadesh-like wordlist comparisons, and
limited real acquaintance with the language.
The present paper will start by summarizing what we know, both from such wordlist
comparisons, and also from the history of the Nepal Deaf communities links with India and
beyond, and will examine some of the inherent defects in the models underlying previous
theorizing, and the special and problems facing all theorizing about sign language affiliation
relationships.
Having done this, it will propose two ways that we can look at the NSL lexicon which might
help alleviate (if not totally solve) the defects and problems: (1) place the NSL lexicon within a
broader framework, both of gesture systems in general and sign language lexical typology, and
(2) analyze it for any underlying (semiotic) structural principles which might set it apart from its
neighbors. Both will be done in comparison not only with similar analyses of Indian Sign
Language, but also with a broad sample of sign languages the authors has been working on over
the years: Japanese, American, Bolivian, Taiwanese and Ethiopian (as well as others described in
the literature). Finally, preliminary results of ongoing work on NSL morphosyntax and discourse
which might further help us puzzle out where NSL fits in will be summarized.
Data for this paper is based on fieldwork with NSL signers at IGNOU (where the author taught
throughout 2011) and in Nepal where he is currently based.
Sentence-final Particles in Dzolo Nàmùyì
FUMINOBU NISHIDA
Akita University, Japan
In Nàmùyì, as spoken in Mianning Prefecture in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Region, casual
conversations among close friends and elatives are abound in sentence-final particles. We can
say sentence-final particles are ubiquitous in Dzolo Nàmùyì. While some have primarily
grammatical function, such as turning a declarative sentence into an interrogative one, most have
affective use, reflecting the attitude or emotion of the speaker. Sentence-final particles serve to
add further nuance to what the speaker is saying beyond the actual content of words themselves.
In this paper, I address the question of what functions are served by sentence-final particles in
Dzolo Nàmùyì. Aiming to provide an overview of the set of sentence-final particles as a whole, I
put forward the following scheme:
a. indicating speech-act categories such as questions, assertions and requests
b. affective and emotional colouring, as expressions of emotions and feelings such as surprise
or doubts and as carriers of intonation
c. indicating the speaker’s judgement of the status of the information being communicated
d. as tokens to facilitate turn-taking in conversation, and
e. evidentiality, i.e. indicating the source of knowledge and information
Particles normally occur in the sentence-final positions. However, thy may also occur after the
sentence topic and at other natural breaks in the sentence. In order to avoid relying on heavily on
intuitive judgments of isolated sentences or short discussions made up by the author, and in order
to broaden the range of data, the present study investigates spontaneous conversation collected
by the author.
The “R” in Nusu: Approximant or Fricative?
ELISSA IKEDA
Payap University, Thailand
Among the world’s languages both approximants and fricatives are the rarest types of rhotics.
Approximants occur in 9.9% of languages and fricatives in only 3.5% (Maddieson 1984).
Ladefoged and Maddieson reported rhotic alveolar fricative phonemes for Czech, Edo, urban
South African English, and the KiVunjo dialect of KiChaka (1996:232, 241). In a few other
languages alveolar rhotic fricatives are realized only in limited environments (i.e., consonant
clusters involving obstruents). These include mostly European Romance languages (Jesus and
Shadle 2005; Recasens 2002) and some Latin American varieties of Spanish (T. Bradley 2004,
Colantoni 2006). Nusu demonstrates the presence of rhotic alveolar fricatives in the Himalayan
area. Snatches of evidence from other languages in the area (Achang, Anong, Mongsen Ao)
suggest that the phenomenon may not be limited only to Nusu.
Nusu is a Loloish (Tibeto-Burman) language spoken in Southwestern Yunnan Province, China
and Northeastern Kachin State, Myanmar. Previous analyses of Nusu conflict in their portrayals
of the alveolar rhotic. Sun and Lu (1986) document /ɹ/ as both an initial and medial consonant.
Fu (1991) lists /ɹ/ only as a part of consonant clusters /Cɹ/. The investigators of this study then
were surprised to find Nusu speakers writing “R” in clusters where the "R" couldn't be heard,
and pronouncing the word-initial rhotic similar to a retroflex sibilant [ʐ]. Utilizing wordlists from
four varieties, it appears that the Nusu rhotic can be realized as an alveolar approximant [ɹ] or a
fricative depending on environment and dialect.
This paper portrays the properties of rhotics as a phonological class and outlines articulatory and
acoustic distinctions between the approximant [ɹ], non-sibilant fricative, and sibilant [ʐ].
Acoustic comparisons of the approximant and fricative variants in Nusu are provided to discuss
their distribution across environments and dialects. Acoustic and experimental methods for
distinguishing the three sounds are also suggested.
What do Indian Languages have: DP or NP?
DEEPAK ALOK
Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
SRINIKET MISHRA
BITS, Mesra, India
The noun phrase is headed by a functional element D, identified with the determiner. The
analysis in which D heads the noun phrase I call the “DP-analysis” (Abney 1987:3). Or,
alternatively the difference between article and article-less languages is that there is null D in
latter (Longobardi 1994). For illustration, the English noun phrase the lion and Magahi noun
phrase ser is represented under DP-hypothesis as (1):
1) a) [DP [ D the [NP [ N lion (English)
b) [DP [D Ø [NP [ N ser (Magahi)
Indian languages do not have (in)definite determiner but since 1987, they have been studied
adopting DP-hypothesis (see Dasgupta & Bhattacharya 1993, Ghosh 1995, Bhattacharya 1999,
on Bangla, Sahoo 1996 on Oriya, Hanybabu 1997 on Malayalam, Thakur 2004 on Hindi). The
paper, following Dayal (2004, 2009), Bošković (2008) among others argues that there is no DP-
analysis of Indian languages. We will shows that NPs in these languages behave syntactically
and semantically different than article languages such as English. One of these, consider the
following:
2) a) bəɽiyɑi həm ti pʰoʈo dekʰəliː (Magahi)
beautiful I picture saw
b) *Beautifuli I saw ti picture (English)
Example (2) shows that the adjective bəɽiyɑi „beautiful‟ can be extracted out of NP in Magahi as
in (2a) but it cannot in English as shown in (2b). In this paper, we examine the differences in
detail and argue that these facts can be captured only if we assume that these languages do not
project DP. We hope that the present analysis will be useful in understanding the different
aspects of noun phrases in Indian languages.
References
Abney, S. (1987). The Noun Phrase in its Sentential Aspect. Ph.D., Dissertation. Cambridge:MIT
Bhattacharya, T. (1999). The Structure of the Bangle DP. Ph.D. Thesis. Londan: University
College London Bošković, Ž. (2008a). What will you have, DP or NP? In Proceedings of
NELS 37.
Dasgupta, P & Bhattacharya, T. (1993). Classiffiers and the Bangla DP. In A. Davinson & F.
Smith (Eds.) selected papers from SALA Roundtable 1993, University of lowa, Lowa
Dayal, V. (2004). Number Marking and (In)definiteness in Kind Terms. Linguistics and
Philosophy 27, 393–450.
Dayal, V. (2009). Semantic Variation and Pleonastic Determiners: The Case of the Plural
Definite Generic”, in Nguyen Chi Duy Khuong, Richa and Samar Sinha (eds.) The Fifth
Asian GLOW: Conference Proceedings, CIIL (Mysore) and FOSSSIL (New Delhi).
Ghosh, R. (1995). DP analysis of English and Bangla Noun Phrases. M.Phil. Dessertation.
CIEFL, Hyderabad
Hanybabu, M. T. (1997). The syntax of functional categories. Ph.D. Thesis. CIEFL, Hyderabad
Longbardi, G. (1994). The Structure of DPs: Some Principles Parameters and Problems. In M.
Baltin & C. Collins (Eds.), pp. 562- 603.
Sahoo, K. (1996). The DP analysis of English and Oriya Noun Phrases. M.Phil. Dessertation.
CIEFL, Hyderabad
Thakur, Anil (2004). The DP analysis of the noun phrase in Hindi. Ph.D Thesis, Department of
Linguistics, University of Delhi.
Deictic Space in Mizo - Interpretations in Discourse
LALNUNTHANGI CHHANGTE
LWC, India
Mizo (formerly Lushai) is a language spoken in the state of Mizoram. It belongs to the Mizo-
Kuki-Chin branch of Tibeto-Burman languages. This paper examines the function of directionals
in the language, especially with respect to discourse.
Mizo indicates direction and location by two methods, both of which can occur concurrently.
Location, with respect to the speaker and addressee is indicated by two determiners in the NP.
Example: he mi hi
This man this
'This man (here)'
There are six possible pairs: Hei hi (this here), Cu cu (that, out of sight), So so (that away from
speaker and addressee), Kha kha (that away from speaker), Khu khu (that down), Khi khi (that
up). These sets of directionals also have a separate function in the context of discourse. For
example, the proximal determiners introduce new participants, in contrast to the distal
determiners that mark old information.
Direction and motion is indicated by pre-verbal directionals. These always occur between the
subject agreement prefix and the head verb.
Example: Ka-han-en
I-up-look
'I went up there and looked' or 'I looked up'
There are four possible directionals: low (towards speaker), ron (towards speaker), va (away
from speaker) han (up away from speaker), zuk (down away from speaker).
These directionals probably had their origins as verbs of motion but they longer function as the
head of the constituent. They can be interpreted as compounds, most likely serial verbs.
However, in the context of discourse they function as markers of the speaker's attitude,
especially with regards as to whether the information is new or unexpected for the speaker.
The paper will examine in detail the features mentioned above with examples from spoken text.
Linguistic affinity between Siraji and Kashmiri: A Morphological
perspective
AADIL A KAK, FAROOQ A SHEIKH
University of Kashmir, India
Kashmiri holds a peculiar linguistic position among the languages of the Indian subcontinent,
with its strong Dardic features as well as Indo-Aryan features. Considering linguistic proximity,
many other minority languages/dialects also share somewhat similar patterns. One of the
minority languages/dialects spoken in Kashmir is Siraji, which is primarily spoken in the hilly
area known as siraj /sira:j/ located partly in District Ramban and partly in District Doda.
Grierson (1919) has classified Siraji as one of the dialects of Kashmiri. Although, Grierson
mentioned similarities of Siraji with other surrounding languages like Western Pahari, Dogri and
Lhanda(Western Panjabi) but he claims that it possesses some strong Dardic features which are
absent in those languages.
The present paper analyses the morphological affinity of Siraji and Kashmiri. In this paper the
focus of study to understand the extent of affinity between the morphology of Siraji and
Kashmiri.
Deictics in a Northern Dialect of Tamang
TOM OWEN SMITH
SOAS, UK
The variety of Tamang spoken on the eastern bank of the Indrawatri Khola in Sindhupalchok
district (Central Region, Nepal) exhibits a reasonably complex deictic system.
This is built on five deictic “bases”: ²cu or Ø- centered on the speaker, ²o- centered on the
addressee, and ²kya-, ¹to-, and ²ma- which indicate locations somewhat distant from both the
speaker and addressee, and situated at roughly the same altitude, a higher altitude and a lower
altitude respectively. Also interacting with this system is ²kha-, which is a base morpheme for
interrogatives. Morphologically, these behave in a similar way to the “deictic primitives” which
Watters (2002: 129-31) describes for Kham, although the semantics of the Tamang bases are
quite different, as are the qualities and combinatorial possibilities of the morphemes and
combinations of morphemes which follow them, generally in quite regular paradigms, to indicate
various objects, people, places, areas, attributes, quantities, actions, manners and directions
according to the deictic reference of the base. Several of these morphemes can also be suffixed to
other, non-deictic word classes such as verbs and nouns, and some have category-changing
properties such as nominalization or adverbialization.
This paper will attempt to give an overview of the deictic system in the Tamang variety of
Indrawati Khola through a morphemic analysis of the various complex deictic forms.
References
Watters, David. 2002. A Grammar of Kham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
SV – VS Alternation in Wa
SENG MAI
Payap University, Thailand
The Wa language belongs to the Palaungic branch of the Mon-Khmer language family. The
Yaong Soi variety of Wa investigated here has two alternative main clause word orders: SVO
and VSO show in (1) and (2). The meaning of both sentences is the same: “Ai Kuhn ate/eats the
ripe mango.”
1. aikʰun pʰɛʔ pliʔ makmuŋ tɯm
Ai Khun eat fruit fruit mango ripe
2. pʰɛʔ aikʰun pliʔ makmuŋ tɯm
eat fruit Ai Khun fruit mango ripe
Although the two word orders appear to be in free variation, this paper reports on different
hypotheses that might motivate the word order alternation. One hypothesis is that the transitivity
of the verb determines the word order. However, the word order variation is not found to be
affected by the transitivity of the verbs.
A second possibility is that changes in sentence meaning are affecting the word order change.
For examples, in some other Karenic languages, changing the SV-VS order also changes the
meaning by increasing or decreasing the subject argument’s volitionality. However, this too is
not found to be the case in Wa.
A third possibility is that word order variation is motivated by the information structure status of
the subject. Analysis of the sentences used in collected stories does not support the hypothesis
that the information structure governs the word order alternation.
At this stage in the research, none of these strong hypotheses works. However there are extra
observations concerning clause types. The word order alternation seems to be affected by the
clause types. The observations based on clause type are summarized in the table below.
Clause Types....................SV........VS
Main clauses....................ok........ok
Dependent clauses (Time)..................ok
Dependent clauses (Reason)................ok
Dependent clauses (Conditional).ok
Complement clauses..............ok........ok
Relative clauses..........................ok
Nominalization............................ok
Preliminary Description of Amri Karbi Phonology
AMALESH GOPE, PRIYANKOO SARMAH
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India
The present paper aims at providing a preliminary description of Amri Karbi phonology. Amri
Karbi belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family and is a variety of Karbi language spoken
in middle and lower Assam.
For the current study the data was collected from Nazirkhat near Sonapur under Kamrup district
of Assam. Three Amri Karbi speakers, all male, were interviewed and recorded. We used the
basic Swadesh 200+ item wordlist to construct our dataset. The findings confirm the presence of
24 phonemes (19 consonants and 5 basic vowels /i, e, a, u, ɔ/). The language has bilabial,
alveolar, and velar stops. Contrasts between voiced and voiceless stops are found in word initial
and word final positions (/pam/ ‘hit’ /bam/ ‘tie’, /tam/ ‘to scold’ /dam/ ‘go’). Aspirated sounds
have very limited occurrence and are found only word initially. The voiced alveolar stop /d/ and
voiced velar stop /ɡ/ showed very limited occurrences. There are three nasal sounds /m, n, ŋ/
(/lam/ ‘to speak’ /lan/ ‘net’ /laŋ/ ‘water’) and three fricatives /s, z, h/. The only voiceless palatal
affricate /tʃ/ is found to be present at word initial position and contrasts with /t/ and /th/ (/tʃ/~/th/,
/tʃeŋ/ ‘to start’ /theŋ/ ‘to grind’, /tʃ/~/t/, /tʃam/ ‘wet’ /tam/ ‘to scold’). The approximants, voiced
dental /r/ and voiced alveolar /l/ contrast with each other (/let/ ‘enter’ /ret/ ‘(jhum) cultivation’
/ŋthel/ ‘beat’ /ŋther/ ‘fool’).
Further, an acoustic analysis was conducted for all the vowels to determine the duration and
perceptual difference. For this analysis, we chose CV syllables (C being a stop consonant)
occurring in the word initial position. A bark table has been drawn to represent the position of
the vowels.
Linguistic Diversity in Nepal and its Perspective on Inclusive Language
Policy
YOGENDRA P YADAV
Nepal Academy & Tribhuvan University, Nepal
This paper aims to explore how far language, a symbol of ethnicity and culture as well as the
most funadamental means of human communication, can serve a criterion for measuring the
extent of social inclusion/exclusion in Nepal and elsewhere. The paper has been organized into
three main sections. Section 1 presents the situation of Nepal's languages focusing on their
enumeration, genetic affiliation, resources, speakers' attitudes and so on. In section 2 we deal
with the impact of linguistic exclusion in various national domains of language use such as
administration, education, and the like. Finally, we suggest how an inclusive language policy can
mitigate the negative effects of linguistic exclusion on the communities whose languages have
remained debarred from use in the aforesaid domains.
Nature and extent of endangerment in Lepcha
SATRUPA DATTAMAJUMDAR
The Asiatic Society, Kolkata, India
Any language becoming endangered and ultimately becoming extinct should be considered as a
loss to mankind in general and to the people of the linguistic area in particular. This loss is
marked by loss of native wisdom and the world view of the speech community in particular and
also loss of enriching life experience for the neighboring cultures and communities. Therefore
loss of language or mother tongue means loss of identity of a community which ultimately leads
us to interrogate the situation in the light of the socio-political issues. Hence the need for
identifying the endangered languages, examining the situation for language shift of these mother
tongues and comparing the experience of different ethnic groups in this regard become essential
in the multilingual and multicultural context of India. This in turn addresses the question of
language equality and inequality in the multilingual Indian social situation. Such a case study
which deals with the endangered situation of Lepcha, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in
Darjeeling district of West Bengal and in Sikkim is attempted in this paper.
The comments on the gradual loss of the Lepcha language in the retrospective literature trigger
attention for an intimate look at the Lepcha language and the speech community. The case study
investigates and analyses the motivation behind language choice and use, and the language
attitude of the Lepcha speech community. In order to explore the endangered situation of the
language, the probable direction of language maintenance and shift has been studied. The socio -
political aspects of Lepcha life and its impact on the Lepcha language and culture across the time
in the multilingual setting has been studied for the purpose. The data of the present work has
been collected from the villages of Kalimpong subdivision of Darjeeling district of West Bengal.
Raji Orthography Development
KAVITA RASTOGI
University of Lucknow
Raji is a little known tribal community which is linked with the prehistoric Kiratas. Atkinson
(1882) stated that these early tribes entered India by the same route as the Aryans and the Kiratas
were the first to arrive than the others. Presently they have been located living in nine small,
remote and distant hamlets, consisting from four to fifteen households. They live in dense
forests far away from the surrounding Kumauni villages of Pithoragarh district in the state of
Uttaranchal. In 2001 census their population was reported to be 680 in all the nine villages. Sir
George Grierson, in his book ‘Linguistic Survey of India’ had named this language as ‘janggali.
Dr. Suniti Kumar Chatterji also supported Greisons’ claim. On the other hand some linguists
(D.D.Sharma and Shobha. R. Sharma) have suggested that the linguistic components of Raji
language were paleo-linguistic relics of some of the Munda dialects, which, in the ancient past
were spoken in the Himalayan region. In my previous work (Rastogi: 2002) I have tried to
establish that though this indigenous language belongs to Tibeto-Burman family yet long contact
with Indo- Aryan languages like Kumauni and Hindi has not only affected its vocabulary but
also its grammar.
Raji can be assessed as ‘potentially endangered and at stage 6, which means the language is at
risk’ if we follow the framework established by Wurm and consider the stages of threatenedness
discussed in Fishman’s GIDS. While chalking out a revitalization programme for this oral
language I realized the need of orthography development for this language because orthography
gives stability to a language and not only conserves it but also helps in the standardization
process of the language. So while preparing a small grammar book, with the help of collected
phonological and grammatical material of Raji the other important task before me was to develop
an orthography system. While developing Raji orthography many linguistic, sociopolitical,
pedagogical and practical principles were considered such as - opinion of the community, use of
Devanagari conventions, and representation of phonemes only and no special symbols so that it
can be learned with maximum ease. The present paper focuses on the early stages of orthography
development for this undocumented indigenous language, instead of discussing the later stages
which are usually discussed in such type of endeavors.
The Ngari Group of Western Tibetan Dialects
BETTINA ZEISLER
Universität Tübingen, Germany
Dialects are often grouped, in a first step, according to a) political boundaries or ethnical
groupings and/ or b) phonetic and lexical features. However, more often than not, dialect
boundaries do not match political boundaries or the present-day ethnical groupings. Furthermore,
merely phonological or lexical features may be more easily borrowed than grammatical features.
For example, according to the previous classification by Roland Bielmeier, and others, the
boundary separating the so-called (phonetically) conservative dialects from the so-called
(phonetically) innovative dialects of Ladakh would run east of Leh, while actually the dialect
boundary between the Shamskat and the Kenhat varieties runs west of Leh. The classification of
dialects as 'western innovative' furthermore does not say anything about the relation of these
dialects among each other or with those of Central Tibet.
Based on research on the early history of Western Tibet, as much as on a comparison of the
dialects in question, I shall suggest a regrouping of the Tibetan dialects of Upper Ladakh
(Kenhat), Himachal Pradesh (Spiti, Nako, Namkat, etc.), and Western Tibet (the so-called Ari
dialects and others) under the name of the former administrative unit /Mngavris khorsum/ 'The
Three Districts of Ngari'. I will demonstrate that the dialects spoken in this region share some
properties which distinguishes them from other dialects of Western Tibet and the western-most
dialects of Baltistan and Lower Ladakh.
Determination of the Indeterminate Bare Noun in Karbi
GAUTAM BORAH, RAUJLINE SIRAJ FARJINA AKHATAR
Tezpur University, Assam
Nouns refer either to objects (i.e. things which are bounded in space, e.g. cars) or masses (i.e.
things that tend to exist in space as something unbounded, i.e. water). Thus, semantically nouns
constitute two broad groups. In a language like English this semantic distinction is grammatically
encoded so that a car-type noun and a water-type noun have different grammatical behaviour.
For instance, a water-type noun is already an NP; a car-type noun is not (e.g. Water is
transparent; *Car is expensive).
However, in a language like Karbi, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in different parts of
Assam (a north eastern State of India), all nouns are NPs at the same time, which is clear from
the following examples from the language, where the object-noun vo ‘crow’ and the mass-noun
chulank ‘milk’ are both NPs designating the kind:
(1) vo keakik
vo ke-akik
crow be-black
‘Crows are black.’
(2) chulank keakelok
chulank ke-akelok
milk be-white
‘Milk is white.’
But depending on the semantic context involved the bare noun (i.e. the noun as NP) in Karbi
may designate any number of instances of the concerned kind (i.e. one or more than one) and
also can have either a generic or non-generic reference. The following example illustrates the
point:
(3) bang kevang
guest NOM-come-PERF
‘A guest has/Some guests have come.’
‘The guest has/The guests have come.’
We thus try to show in this paper how the bare noun in Karbi is grammatically determined - that
Karbi has a set of imprecise quantifiers which are either inherently indefinite or definite. For
precise quantification of the bare noun Karbi employs numerals along with classifiers and
measure terms, which are, however, reference-independent. Thus it is the word order involved
that determines the reference of a precisely quantified NP.
Verbal Suffixes in Inpui
W PINKY DEVI
Assam University, Silchar
‘Inpui’ is the name of the language as well as the name of the community. It is spoken in the
Haochong sub-division of Tamenglong district, Manipur which is 63 km away from the Imphal
town. The language belongs to the Naga-Bodo sub group of Kabui section of Tibeto-Burman
family (cf: Grierson, LSI volume, iii & part ii). It has a population of 13,000 speakers. The
present paper is an attempt to describe the role of verbal suffixes in the language. In this paper I
would like to draw out the suffixes which constitute the verbs in the language under study i.e.,
Inpui. It is an SOV language. Verbal suffix in this language can be classified into seven
categories viz., suffixes forming mood, negative, imperative, interrogative, adverbial, copula,
suffix of destruction. The mood suffix in the language is ‘-nom’ (phaŋ-nom-me ‘want to see’)
indicating ‘desire’ or ‘wish’. It is generally added to a dynamic verb. While certain stative verbs
like ‘səy’ ‘tall’ ‘toi’ ‘short’ etc. also takes this suffix. This language has two types of negative
suffixes ‘-mək’ ( phaŋ-mək-o ‘don’t look’) which is used in indicating non future, prohibitive,
interrogative, negative, let negative and negative strengthening whereas ‘ -ləy’ ( kəday- ləy-e
‘will not play)which is used to indicate future negative only. Imperative suffixes in the language
includes of ‘-o’, ‘-ro’, ‘-yo’,‘-co’ and ‘-ŋo’(tui in-ro ‘drink water’). Interrogative suffixes
includes of -bo/-po and -coŋ/zoŋ (nəŋ zu in-bo? ‘do you drink liquor?’). Adverbial suffix in the
language is ‘-gə’(bəzaŋ-gə‘slowly’). The suffix ‘-me’ is the copula in the language. It can be
added to stative as well as dynamic verbs. The suffix -bək, -cət and -tut indicates the meaning of
destruction or break. The above points have been discussed in this paper with appropriate
illustrations.
Phonological description of Saora and Mundari in Assam
LUKE HORO
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India
Austro-Asiatic languages are primarily divided into Mon-Khmer and Munda subfamilies. The
Munda languages are a smaller group located in central and eastern India. The present study aims
at giving a preliminary analysis of the phonological features of Saora and Mundari of the Munda
family as spoken in Assam. The study is founded on field recordings and the analysis is based on
speech data. Saora and Mundari speech data were collected from Saora and Mundari speakers in
the Sonitpur District of Assam. Three speakers of both Saora and Mundari were recorded as they
read Saora and Mundari words in isolation for the 207 Swadesh list. The data was later digitized
at a sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz and 24 bit resolution. The acoustic analysis of the
consonantal and the vowel inventories of the two languages are presented in the paper. The
phonemic features their characteristics are also discussed.
In the consonantal inventory the paper also aims at qualifying the notion that phonetically all
Austro-Asiatic languages have a tendency not to release final stops and verifies whether it is the
case in the two Munda languages of the current study. In terms of syllable structure, it has been
observed that the two languages have an abundance of consonantal clusters. The study also looks
at the consonantal restrictions for forming such clusters.
This study tries to give a preliminary description of the phonological features of two Munda
languages as they are spoken in Assam, supported by acoustic analysis of the speech data. This
study aims at providing a base for further studies on Munda languages in the area.
The prosody of contrastive focus in Bodo
SHAKUNTALA MAHANTA, KALYAN DAS
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India
The study in the discussion focuses on the distribution of Bodo nouns and pronouns in
adjacent intonational Phrases expressing contrastive meanings. A detailed view of these nouns
and pronouns in such environments would provide a general view of prominence realizations in
Bodo in terms of focus marking. To look into the nature of tonal pattern when such nouns and
pronouns are placed in the environment of contrastive focus marking, following target words
were embedded in carrier sentences: [nɔˊ] (house), [haˋtʰaiˊ] (market), [zɯˋŋ] (us), [nɯˊŋ] (you).
The target words are placed in carrier sentences consisting of two clauses expressing contrastive
meaning. In other words, the carrier sentences are designed in such a manner that they express
contrastive prominence or contrastive focus. A focus of a sentence represents a word or
constituent that receives prominence either by means of syntax, morphology, prosody or a
combination thereof (Kugler and Genzel, 2009). Bodo uses both prosodic means to highlight
information and also it uses a morphological focus marker. At the level of prosodic means of
expressing contrast, change in pitch span and duration is used to express a contrastive meaning.
Also Bodo uses the morphological focus marker [sɯˊ] to highlight information. The addition of
the suffix [sɯˊ] to the focused constituent also adds a different F0 value to it. The target words
are then placed in the following data set consisting of six sentences: The production experiment
for the present study consisted of one rendering of the each utterance in the data set (1) to (4) by
seven speakers of Bodo language.
(1) aŋ nɔao tʰaŋa hatʰaijao tʰaŋɡɯn
I-sg house-LDC go-NEG market-LDC go-FUT
I’ll not go home, I’ll go to the market.
(2) aŋ hatʰaijao tʰaŋa nɔao tʰaŋɡɯn
I-sg market-LDC go-NEG house-LDC go-FUT
I’ll not go to the market, I’ll go to home.
(3) aŋ nɔao tʰaŋa hatʰaijaosɯ tʰaŋɡɯn
I-sg house-LDC go-NEG market-LDC-EXP go-FUT
I’ll not go home, I’ll go to the market.
(4) aŋ hatʰaijao tʰaŋa nɔaosɯ tʰaŋɡɯn
I-sg market-LDC go-NEG house-LDC -EXP go-FUT
I’ll not go to the market, I’ll go to home.
A detailed consideration of the F0 pattern of the data set (1) to (4) in the production experiment
revealed that contrastive focus in Bodo involves a significant decrease in pitch height of the
morpheme getting this kind of prosodic prominence. F0 pattern in the production experiment
involving the data set (1) to (4) shows that the presence of the morphological focus marker [sɯˊ],
which bears an H tone, results in changes in the inherent tonal specifications of the morphemes
preceding it or following it. The morpheme is also lengthened under contrastive focus. This
feature of Bodo corroborates the view that a focus-marking pitch accent typically increases the
durations of segments in and to some extent near the accented syllable (Gussenhoven, 2004).
Languages indeed differ with respect to the prosodic properties they use for the expression of
prominence or focus and Bodo uses a decrease in pitch height with increasing prosodic
prominence. The lowering in Bodo is obvious on [nɔˊ] (house), which surfaces with an L tone
compared to the suffix [aoˊ], which gets an H tone. In other words an L* gets aligned to the
monosyllabic noun root and consequently it surfaces with a lower pitch peak.
Referential Hierarchies in the Kashmiri Languages
SAARTJE VERBEKE
FWO - Ghent University, Belgium
This paper investigates the influence of referential hierarchies on person marking and case
marking in Kashmiri. The term "referential hierarchies" is used in the broad sense of Bickel
(2010), i.e., as an umbrella term under which several scales are understood, known separately as
animacy hierarchy, indexicality hierarchy, person hierarchy, etc. It is argued that Kashmiri is a
language with "hierarchical alignment", an alignment pattern which is not dependent on lexical
meaning or grammatical roles but determined by these referential hierarchies (cf. Siewierska
2008). Based on findings predominantly in Amerindian languages, hierarchical alignment is
generally claimed to be limited to head-marking languages. However, Kashmiri seems to be an
example of a language with an agreement and a case marking pattern determined by referential
hierarchies.
The Kashmiri languages present both head-marking and dependent-marking. The head-marking
operates on two levels: there is a gender/number agreement system and a suffix system of
dependent person markers. In perfective constructions, an ergative pattern is in evidence;
however, other constructions seem to be hierarchically aligned, as illustrated in the following
examples from Standard Kashmiri.
(1) təhi on-iv-on su yoor (‘you brought him here’)
you.ERG.PL bring.PST.M.SG-2PL-3SG he.NOM.SG here
(2) tsi ch-u-kh me parinaav-aan (‘you teach me’)
you.NOM.SG AUX.PRS-M-2SG I.OBJ.SG teach-PTCP.PRS
(3) bi ch-u-s-ath tsi parinaav-aan (‘I teach you’)
I.NOM.SG AUX.PRS-M-1SG-2SG you.NOM.SG teach-PTCP.PRS
In (1), a perfective construction, the case marking and the gender/number agreement follow an
ergative pattern, but the person hierarchy additionally demands that the second person argument
be marked on the verb. In (2)-(3), there is a difference in case marking of P, determined by the
person hierarchy. If the ranking is direct, i.e. A is higher-ranked than P, then P is marked in the
nominative (3), but if P is ranked higher than A, then P is in the objective case (2). Head-
marking and dependent-marking are obviously determined by the referential hierarchies;
however, in what ways is often less clear.
This paper will illustrate the hierarchical pattern with various examples from Standard Kashmiri,
supplemented by illustrations from Old Kashmiri manuscripts and Kashmiri dialects, such as
Poguli and Kashtawari.
Language Use and Documentation of dPa’ ris Amdo Tibetan
SHIHO EBIHARA
TUFS/JSPS , Japan
dPa’ ris area is situated at the north-east end of the Qinghai-Tibet highlands. The Tibetan dialect
spoken in this area belongs to Amdo in traditional classification, but it has different
characteristics (phonemes, vocabularies, auxiliary verbs, case marking system etc.) from other
dialects of Amdo Tibetan. Due to the location, the people in dPa’ ris area have been subjected to
the cultural contacts with Han and other ethnics (Tu, Hui, Menggu etc.). As a result, many
ethnics are living together. Furthermore, in Huzhu county where the present author did
fieldwork, Tibetan is not taught in schools. In this situation, the number of dPa' ris dialect
speakers is on a declining trend.
This study presents the data of the situation of language use and documentation of this
dialect. The language description and its publication are also required from the people living in
dPa’ ris. Therefore the present author is compiling these data into a book for giving the outputs
back to the community. The topic of the suitable documentation both for the community and
researchers (data used as a primary linguistic data) will be also discussed in the presentation.
Spell Checker for Bodo: A Finite-State Automata Approach
RAVIKUMAR RAGAM, BANEESSH N, SHANMUGAM R
CDAC, Pune, India
Finite State Automata are a highly versatile tool for Natural Language Processing and can be
efficiently deployed to handle both "simple" morphology as well as "complex" morphology
involving agglutination. Bodo is a Tibeto-Burman language with a complex morphotactics. The
proposed paper tries to address the implementation of FST's to Bodo word grammar for Lexical
processing with specific reference to the design of a Spell checker. The paper starts off with a
short State of the Art survey of Spell checkers. Basic Bodo morphology and morphotactics are
presented in Part Two. The third part of the paper presents an overview of the approach for
solving these problems using Finite State Automata and Morphological chaining which ensures
correct paradigm structure. Since the data is tagged for Parts of Speech Tagging, the Spell
checker engine contains a Morphological Analyzer. A sophisticated suggestion module ensures
that the number of suggestions provided is around three to four. The design makes for a compact
engine of around 1.82MB (Bodo) which is memory efficient and yet contains root words Bodo
9000 approx. with an exponential vocabulary of 40 million approx. “exploded” words. The Spell
checker supports Unicode character encoding and will be able to handle the compounds (N +N,
V+N, ADJ+N etc.) and complex morphology of Bodo. It will be able to parse even highly
inflected words with simple rules.
References
Aronoff, M. and Fudeman, K. 2005. What is Morphology? In Handbook of Natural
Language Processing. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell. 56
Beesley, K. and Karttunen, L. 2003. Finite State Morphology. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Phukan Basumatary, 2005. An introduction to the Boro Language. Mittal Publication, New
Delhi.
Sounds and syllables in Koch dialect of Rabha
PRIYANKOO SARMAH, KALYAN DAS
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India
Dialectal variations often provide important clues to synchronic and diachronic sound changes in
languages. Changes affecting one variety, making it distinct from the other, may also explain
universalness of certain properties in natural languages. Hence, in this study we attempt to
conduct a comparative phonological study of two varieties of Rabha.
There has been no comparative phonological study of the varieties of Tibeto-Burman languages.
In case of Rabha, although a few studies described the Rongdani variety of the language, no
attempts were made to study the other varieties of the language. This paper makes an attempt to
give a preliminary description of the sounds and syllables of the Koch variety of Rabha based on
observation and analysis of 215 words pronounced in Koch Rabha by two speakers. The study
also focuses on features that make Koch Rabha a distinct variety from the already studied
Rongdani variety of Rabha.
A detail look at the information gathered from the rendering of the 215 words selected for the
present study revealed that Koch Rabha does not possess voiceless palatal plosive [c] which is
found in the phonemic inventory of Rongdani Rabha as mentioned by Basumatary (2004). While
looking into the vowel phonemes in Koch Rabha, acoustic information provided evidence for the
existence of an unrounded central vowel in Koch Rabha instead of the unrounded back high
vowel [ɯ] found in the descriptions of the Rongdani variety. This may be due to a tendency to
opt for the neutral vowel from the point of view of articulation in Koch Rabha. Koch Rabha also
shows its distinctiveness in initial consonant clusters in syllable. Whereas Rongdani Rabha
allows syllable initial [kr] cluster and [tl] cluster, Koch Rabha does not allow such clusters and
puts a vowel between such consonant sequences.
It is assumed that these preliminary results will be only starting points for a more comprehensive
and detailed comparison of the dialects and such studies would certainly provide insights for
language evolution as well as synchronic variations of languages.
References
Basumatary. P C (2004) A Study in Cultural and Linguistic Affinities of the Boros and
the Rabhas of Assam, Ph D Dissertation, Gauhati Univertisy.
Joseph and Burling (2006) The Comparative Phonology of the Baro Garo Languages,
CIIL, Mysore.
Sarmah. P (2009) Tone System of Dimasa and Rabha: A Phonetic and Phonological
Study. Ph D Dissertation, University of Florida.
Digitizing Language with NLP tools and Technologies: An Overview of
Nepali
ATIUR RAHAMAN KHAN
C-DAC, Pune, India
This paper will describe the initiatives taken by C-DAC GIST Pune under the aegis of
TDIL(Technology Development for Indian Languages), Ministry of Communications and
IT, Govt. of India for strengthening the Nepali language through various basic and high-
end NLP tools and the Nepali Language CD. This paper is an awareness paper the main
aim of which is to focus on Nepali in India.
One of the Himalayan languages that C-DAC Pune has been working on is Nepali.
Nepali is one of the official languages recognized by the government of India and is
spoken by 45 million people around the world including India and Nepal. A typical Indo-
aryan language with a rich inflecting and complex morphology, it deserves being
exploited linguistically for NLP tasks enabling its speakers to use their language in the
Internet era.
Prompted by the need to put Nepali on the digital map the initiative was taken to develop
various basic and high-end NLP tools and technologies for the language. The first phase
spanning three years was devoted in developing the basic infrastructure(required for
computational task for any language) viz. Unicode compliant Fonts, Unicode compliant
keyboard, CLDR for operating systems, Script Grammar for a standardized ligatures of
the script of the linguistic community are among the grass-root NLP tools. Furthermore,
the digitalization proved successful for some higher end tasks such as the creation of
compatibility with different browsers.
As far as the language CD is concerned the following tools and applications are made
available for easy creation, storage and transmission of data in Nepali
1. True type keyboards and fonts
2. Unicode compliant open type fonts
3. Unicode compliant keyboard for Nepali
4. Nepali Firefox browser, Thunderbird for email and Pidgin
5. A bilingual dictionary
6. Sunbird calender in Nepali, Scribus page layout
The availability of NLP tools and some other software and technologies in the
incorporated in the Nepali Language CD will enable the users to create, share, conserve
data in their mother-tongue using the latest technologies without any hindrance.
References
Bal, Bal Krishna (??). A Morphological Analyzer and a Stemmer for Nepali. Madan
Puraskar Pustakalay, Nepal.
Bal, Bal Krishna (??). NLP tools for Nepali. Madan Puraskar Pustakalay. Nepal.
Prasain, Balaram. 2011. A computational Analysis of Nepali Morphology: A Model for
Natural Language Pprocessing. Doctoral Thesis submitted at the Tribhuvan
University, Nepal.
Jurafsky, Daniel and Martin, James H (2002). Speech and Language Processing-An
Introduction to NLP, Computational Linguistics and Speech Recognition. Pearson
Education.
Parakh, Mona and Rajesha N.(2011). Developing Morphological Analyzers for Four
Indian Languages Using a Rule Based Affix Stripping Approach. Language in
India. Special Volume.May 2011.
Koskoniemi, Kimmo. (2007). Notes on the Two-level Morphology. In A Man of Measure.
www.tdil-dc.in
www.cdac.in/gist
Different functions of pu in Leinong Naga
ESTHER WAYESHA
Payap University, Thailand & SIL, Myanmar
This research focuses on the Leinong Naga language spoken in Lahe town and surrounding
villages of northwest Myanmar. It is one of the eighty Naga varieties found in Burma and India.
It is verb final, tonal, and has little morphology.
This research describes how the lexical pu²¹ „father‟ is grammaticalized and used for different
grammatical purposes. The following uses of pu²¹ have been identified.
Lexical
1) “father”
2) “male”
3) “thing”
4) “the one”
Grammatical
1) Possessive
2) Event nominalizer
3) Agent nominalizer
4) Patient nominalizer
5) Relativizer (agent or patient)
6) Place nominalizer
7) Postpostional subordinator
8) Adverbial subordinator
This paper exemplifies each of these uses and focuses on some interesting ambiguities that arise
in actual use. Since pu²¹ is used for many different grammatical functions, sometimes
nominalizations (and relative clauses) marked by pu²¹ are structurally identical and semantically
ambiguous. For example, the phrase below has five possible interpretations.
ɡio⁴⁴ pu²
steal REL/NMLZ
stealer, thing stolen, (his) stealing, (the one) who steals, (the thing) that (he) stole
Many of the ambiguities found with pu²¹arise from the pro-drop nature of Leinong Naga. In
conversation the context often disambiguates, but in written form the ambiguity can persist. This
paper also investigates some constraints on case and aspect marking that differs between the
various pu²¹ constructions. Based on these properties it is often possible to eliminate these
ambiguities with only slight grammatical modification.
Compunding in Dimasa
KH. DHIREN SINGHA
Assam University, Silchar
Dimasa is one of the Tibeto-Burman languages of Southeast Asia mainly spoken in Dima
Hasao district of Assam, India, with a total population of 1, 11,961 according to 2001 Census
of India. Benedict (1972) places Dimasa in the Bodo-Garo group of the Tibeto-Burman branch
of the Sino-Tibetan language family with its sister languages like Boro, Deori, Garo,
Kokborok, etc. Typologically, Dimasa is a tonal, agglutinative, and verb final language.
Compounding is one of the common linguistic features of the languages of the Southeast Asia
and it plays a significant role to form new words. Therefore, Goddard (2004) supported the fact
that “the Sinitic languages, and most of the languages of mainland Southeast Asia, do not use
much affixation for derivational purposes but they use compounding a great deal. Many of these
languages have a preference for two-element compounds”. As a language of this sub-continent,
Dimasa is no exception in this regard i.e., compounding is one of the productive word formation
processes in the language.
The present paper is an attempt to explore different morpho-syntactic aspects of compounding in
Dimasa. Dimasa employs different types of compounding with different morpho-syntactic
functions as such (i) noun + noun compound (ii) noun + augmentative compound (iii) noun +
diminutive compound (iii) noun + verb compound (iv) verb + verb compound (v) numeral
compound and so on. Interestingly, noun + noun compound is the most productive type of
compound in the language as many other Tibeto-Burman languages of Southeast Asia do.
Lexicalization of Syntactic patterns
BISHAKHA DAS
Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
What is the notion of word in an Isolating language like Tai-Khamti? Although a bulk of Khamti
words are monomorphemic yet, we find the compounding of two or more discrete units has
enriched the lexicon of the language. However, not all disyllabic or polysyllabic words can be
segmented into independent meaningful syllabic units. In certain cases we also find all the
syllabic units do not compose meaningfully into one word. In addition, the language not only
exhibits fluidity in case of content and function words, free morpheme and bound morpheme but
also polysyllabic nouns, compound words and phrases.
The paper explores words larger than a syllable and focuses on the indeterminacy and fluidity
between a compound word and a phrase. What role do certain discrete units of a polysyllabic
word play in “grammaticalization” or in the making of syntax.
The word constituent ordering in Tai-Khamti shows both SOV and SVO. However, SOV is
found to be more dominant. The present paper probes how far the popular maxim of Givon
“Today’s morphology is yesterday’s syntax” is true in the case of the composition of a particular
section of disyllabic words.
SVO order: kan1 [təm
2 khəu
4 ]VP
“Kan grinds rice”
Compound word: təm2 khəu
4 ( grind – rice) “de-husk”
Compound word: phun1 tok
1 (rain-to fall) “to rain”
Similarly,
wan5 tok1 (day – to fall) “west”
wan5 ok1 (day- come out) “east”
In addition, this study, aims to trace the lexicalization of syntactic structures that takes place in
the language.
Distribution of Topic and Focus Particles in Meiteilon
SANATOMBI DEVI
Manipur University, India
The study of Topic and Focus is not a new thing for linguistics but for Meiteilon there has been
no relevant work in this area so far. This paper will examine the interesting phenomena in the
usage of topic and focus particles through various types of sentences in Meiteilon. The four focus
particles –-su, -fao, -tang, -ngai and the two topic particles budi, and –di will be explored and
analyzed.
Focus particles in Meiteilon
Meiteilon has four focus particles: -su, -fao, -ngai, and –tang. They include both inclusive and
exclusive focus markers. The examples in (1) are illustrative.
(1) a. tomba- tang yum-da chat -khi
tomba- Foc home-loc go -pst
‘Only Tomba went home.’
b. tomba- fao yum-da chat -khi
tomba- Foc home-loc go -pst
'Even Tomba went home.’
The examples above show the different uses of focus particles in Meiteilon: exclusive (1a) and
inclusive (1b).
Distribution of Topic particles ‘-budi’ and ‘-di’ in Meiteilon:
Meiteilon has two Contrastive Topic particles –budi and –di which carries the same meaning. It
can be noted here that –bu in Meiteilon is used as an Accusative case marker and –di as a topic
marker. Although it is clear that -bu and –di are separate particles, budi is used as a topic marker
in Meiteilon. The usage of this topic particles in Meiteilon are shown below.
(2) a. tomba-budi, lairik yaam pa-i
tomba-Top book a lot read-pres
‘As for Tomba, he reads a lot.’ \
b. tomba-di, lairik yaam pa-i
tomba-Top book a lot read-pres
‘As for Tomba, he reads a lot.’
This research paper will provide a detailed account on the distribution of Topic and Focus
particles and their certain features associated with its construction in different types of sentences
in Meiteilon.
Phonological Description of Saora and Mundari in Assam
LUKE HORO
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India
Austro-Asiatic languages are primarily divided into Mon-Khmer and Munda subfamilies. The
Munda languages are a smaller group located in central and eastern India. The present study aims
at giving a preliminary analysis of the phonological features of Saora and Mundari of the Munda
family as spoken in Assam. The study is founded on field recordings and the analysis is based on
speech data. Saora and Mundari speech data were collected from Saora and Mundari speakers in
the Sonitpur District of Assam. Three speakers of both Saora and Mundari were recorded as they
read Saora and Mundari words in isolation for the 207 Swadesh list. The data was later digitized
at a sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz and 24 bit resolution. The acoustic analysis of the
consonantal and the vowel inventories of the two languages are presented in the paper. The
phonemic features their characteristics are also discussed.
In the consonantal inventory the paper also aims at qualifying the notion that phonetically all
Austro-Asiatic languages have a tendency not to release final stops and verifies whether it is the
case in the two Munda languages of the current study. In terms of syllable structure, it has been
observed that the two languages have an abundance of consonantal clusters. The study also looks
at the consonantal restrictions for forming such clusters.
This study tries to give a preliminary description of the phonological features of two Munda
languages as they are spoken in Assam, supported by acoustic analysis of the speech data. This
study aims at providing a base for further studies on Munda languages in the area.
Formation of Nominal Stems in Mising
BABY DOLEY, BASANTA DOLEY
Silapathar College, Assam, India
Mising is a language that is widely spoken in eight districts of Assam by a tribe called Mising
who were referred to as Miri in the past records. It is also spoken in some pockets of Arunachal
Pradesh. The report of the 2001 census recorded 587310 Mising population in Assam. They
migrated down to the Brahmaputra valley from the northeastern part of the Sub-Himalayan range
of mountainous regions falling presently in Arunachal Pradesh as far back as 12th century A.D.
Significantly, the Mising language is still a little studied language.
This paper will deal with the processes by which nominal stems in Mising are formed. This will
explain the devices by which the combination of different elements is accomplished to form a
nominal stem in the language. The Mising nominal stems may be classified into two broad
categories : the derived and the underived. The derived nouns are formed by adding
nominalizing suffixes to verbal roots while the underived ones, except the independent stems, are
the combinations of (i) two bound morphemes, (ii) two final syllables of two different disyllabic
morphemes by way of apheresis, (iii) the final syllable of a disyllabic nominal morpheme with a
monosyllabic verbal root, (iv) the final syllable of a numeral with the preceding component and
(v) finally, prefix plus numeral.
The stems of (i) above, for instance, are formed by such two bound morphemes as /pə-/+/-
be:/>/pəbe:/ ‘parrot’; (ii) above are formed by the blending of the second syllable of one
disyllabic morpheme with the second syllable of another disyllabic morpheme, thus : /alag/‘the
hand’+/amɨd/‘hair’>/lagmɨd/‘hair on the hand’, /amɔŋ/ ‘soil, land’+/anu/‘new’>/mɔ:nu/ ‘new
land’, /asi/‘water’+/aruŋ/‘hole’>/siruŋ/ ‘well’ etc.
Khoibu Tone
L BIJENKUMAR SINGH
Assam University, Silchar, India
The present paper entitled “Khoibu Tone” is a description of the tone system of Khoibu, a
Tibeto-Burman language being spoken by Khoibu tribe. The literal meaning of this tribe is
derived from ‘khoi’ and ‘pu’, where ‘khoi’ means ‘bee’ and ‘pu’ means ‘owner’. Thus the term
refers to the speakers of this language as the ones who own ‘bee’, ‘beehives’ and ‘honey’ in the
indigenous land of Khoibu territory. Khoibu is also known as Uipo and it belongs to the Kuki
Chin Naga group of Tibeto-Burman family (cf. Grierson LSI, Vol.-III, part-II, 1903). Khoibu is
mostly spoken in Chandel district of Manipur. It is spoken by approximately 2800 speakers in
the Machi sub-division of Chandel district, Manipur and there are eight Khoibu villages which
are confined to Chandel district of Manipur which is the area where this language is being
spoken. Khoibu is a tonal language and there are three tones in Khoibu, viz. rising ( ), level ( )
and falling ( ). /ná/‘leaf’ /na/‘baby’ /nà/‘nose’ ; /lá/‘song’/la/‘fragment of a yarn’ /là/‘a small
piece’ ; /mǝ-tí/ ‘seed’/mǝ-ti/ ‘tender tissue’/mǝ-tì/ ‘salt’. In most of the cases the vowel phoneme
of the first segment is level tone in disyllabic words. Similarly in monosyllabic words the first
vowel is level in tone in VV structure. In the case of monosyllabic words if the syllabic structure
is CV, all the vowels are long in level tones. Sandhi phenomenon in relation to tones also has
been discussed illustratively with examples. Tone sandhi occurs when pronominal markers /kei-/,
/nei-/ and /a-/ are added to the monosyllabic nouns. There are three types of sandhi rules in
Khoibu. The three sandhi rules will be illustrated with appropriate examples.
Factors responsible for code-switching in Gulgulia SNEHA MISHRA
Indian Institute of Mines, Dhanbad
This paper briefly discusses the factors which contribute in code-switching in Gulgulia language
which is the mother-tongue of the Gulgulia community.
The Gulgulias are a nomadic community, often found on the out-skirts of villages, near railway
stations or forests. They are widely distributed in the states of Jharkhand, Bihar and Bengal who
live by arranging shows of monkeys and bears, begging and even petty thieving.
While exploring the ethnolinguistic vitality of Gulgulia, a research worthy aspect was detected
where Gulgulia exhibits a consistent pattern of multilingualism such as in situational code
switching where domains determine the language of choice.The inhabitants cease using Gulgulia
and adhere to Hindi, Bengali or Khorta etc during social domains like religious practices and in
other festive celebrations. This is an interesting phenomenon that there is somewhat different
language use in some specific domains and it is very likely that this phenomenon will become a
threat to the existence of Gulgulia in the future.
Combining the general description of the Gulgulia people, Gulgulia language and its use in
society with the pattern of code-switching in Gulgulia under certain domains, this paper delves
widely widely into the factors that contribute in such code-switching thereby channelising our
concentration towards the influence of this code-switching upon the existence of Gulgulia
language in the future.
Semantics of Genitive Case in Nepali
LAXI NATH KANDEL
Banaras Hindu University, India
Unlike other cases, genitive case expresses varieties of meanings in Indo-Aryan languages.
Genitive case in Nepali is one of the least studied topics. In this language cases are marked with
postpositions and the marker of genitive case is {k} which is used jointly with nominal
agreement markers ‘o’ (m,sg), ‘aa’(m/f,pl) and ‘ii’(f,sg). Thus generally ‘ko’, ‘kaa’ and ‘kii’ are
considered genitive markers in Nepali. These markers express various meanings or relations
between modifiers and those which are modified, both of which may be words (e.g. nouns,
adjectives, adverbs), phrases (e.g. noun phrases, adjective phrases, adverb phrases), clauses or
sentences. In the recent works in any language, genitive case is generally defined as a relation
between two NPs. But genitive case is not restricted to noun phrases, it is the subject of adjective
phrases and adverb phrases also. This paper is an attempt to show all the environments of uses of
genitive case in Nepali.
The main finding of this paper is an attempt to calculate all the possible meanings expressed by
genitive case marker in Nepali and to classify them. In the former works made in Nepali the
meanings expressed by genitive marker are listed just 10-15. In this paper the types of meanings
are more than double of that number. Here, the meanings of genitive case in Nepali are classified
mainly in two types: (I) included in the wider meaning ‘connection’ (e.g. possession,
attributiveness, purpose, source, kinship, partitiveness, etc.) and (II) other than that (e.g.
comparison, change, in the place of, etc.).
Meanings of the genitive are also determined by context and the nature of meanings of linguistic
units which precede or follow the genitive marker. The studies of this type are also included in
this paper.
Diminutives in Western Pahari Languages
JC SHARMA
Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, India
Gender is an inherent property of nouns in most of the Modern Indo Aryan languages. In animate
nouns there is a correspondence between grammatical and natural gender. Masculine & feminine
nouns usually refer to males and females respectively. As regards inanimate nouns, they refer to
grammatical gender as well as some times show distinction of size. Diminutive which is a
property of inanimate nouns as well as personal name based on the semantic fact of size or short
form is not given that much of significance as seen from many linguistic descriptions of
languages. Many grammars have dealt diminutives of inanimate nouns as part of gender
derivation. In most of the Modern Indo-Aryan languages showing distinction of two genders
(masculine & feminine), diminutives are formed by adding suffix to an inanimate nouns and the
derived form is invariably in feminine gender and under lying form is in masculine. Hindi,
Punjabi etc. can be cited as examples where gender suffixes are also expressive of size. The
diminutive suffixes correspond with the gender suffixes so much that the feminine gender and
diminutive forms overlap in the sense that small size is marked by feminine suffix and large size
is marked by masculine suffix. It has been generally found that objects denoting small size are
feminine in gender and objects of big size are masculine in gender but this does not hold fully
true in case of many languages including Pahari language. In German the gender of the
diminutive is always neuter regardless of the gender of the underlying form, e.g. der Tisch (mas)
the table’ das Tischchen (neu) the little table’ etc.
Two-way contract of size i.e. big vs. small is very common in languages with or without the
grammatical gender. In Oriya gender is grammatical but diminutives are formed. Here as shown
above diminutives are formed by morphological process by adding suffixes. To its contrary in
English & Dravidian languages the same will be expressed by syntactic construction with the
help of modifier viz. big table vs. small table. In Indo-Aryan languages where gender is
grammatical it is not possible to talk of diminutives without reference to gender, as it is inherent
in all the nouns. Languages usually with two genders masculine & feminine have the distinction
of two sizes (except Western Pahari) big and small is usually comparable with the masculine and
feminine gender which could be seen above in languages like Hindi and Punjabi. There are some
languages like Gujarati, Marathi, Konkani (Major language), Bhili group of languages,
Bhadarwabi and Sirnauri languages of Western Pahari group have distinction of three genders. It
is to be seen how the gender distinction and diminutives correlate. In Gujarati with three
genders, the masculine indicate an extra large object, feminine a small object while the neuter
may have a pejorative annotation e.g.
/rotlo/ (mas) ‘coarse bread leaf’ /rotli/ (fem) ‘thin round bread’
/rotlu/ (neu) ‘poor quality bread’ /matlo/ (fem) ‘extra large pot’
/matli/ (fem) ‘small pot’ /maltu/ (neu) ‘poor of pot’
(of: Cardoma 1965: p 64)
The position is not the same in languages, which have three genders. It is not always true that
diminutive form is to be in feminine genders and the neuter gender gives a perjorative
connotation. For example in Gade Lohar Dialect the small size could be in any of the three
genders viz masculine, feminine and neuter and the diminutive form could be derived with or
without any change in gender of the underlying form. A few examples listed to illustrate:
/haasii/ (fem) ‘big pair of tongs’ : /haasiyo/ (mas) ‘small pair of tongs’
/chini/ (fem) ‘big chisel’ : /chinTi/ (fem) ‘small chisel’
/hathoRo/ (mas) ‘big hammer’ : /hathoRiyo/ (mas) ‘small hammer’
/ghaRo/ (mas) ‘earthen’ : /ghaRiyo/ (mas) ‘small earthen pitcher’
/Dhol/ (neu) ‘big drum’ : /Dholaka/ (neu) ‘small drum’
(cf Sharma 1988:P.P. 62-63)
Thus all the languages with three genders do not behave the same way and it is different to make
any generalization of this kind that nouns expressing small size is always feminine in gender. It
is, hence imperative to treat diminutive forms separately than the gender formation as some
languages such as Oriya & Bangla do not have gender distinction but still have the distinction of
size.
It is to be seen in NIA languages where there are more than two forms of nouns based on size, do
they behave like Gujarati marking three genders. In case the languages have the distinction of
two genders, which many of the Western Pahari dialects have, what would be the gender of the
other forms, which is used to mark extra large size?
A Comprehensive Grammar of Aka
SK BANERJEE
NSOU, Kokata, India
Aka language is spoken in the district of West Kameng of Arunachal Pradesh. The speakers of
this language are also known as Aka tribe. The present information is based on the field notes of
the on-going Aka Project sponsored by ICSSR. The information of Aka language is collected
from the Aka villages spread in the foot hills of West Kameng district. A comprehensive
grammar of Aka language will be presented in this paper. The grammar will include- a brief
description of phonology, morphology and syntax.
Phonological information: The language has 32 consonants. The unique features are:
a) Presence of dental and alveolar sounds--/t, d/ and /t_, d_ /
b) Presence of four nasals--/m, n, _, _ /
c) Presence of eight fricatives etc..vowels, besides
eight primary vowels. Among the suprasegmentals – three to five tones are present in Aka
language. Besides phonology a brief account of morphology and sentence pattern will also be
discussed in this paper.
Negative Word Acts in Positive Mood: A Comparative Study between
Bangla and Nepali
RG DASTIDAR, S MUKHOPADHYAY
Koklata, India
Discourse particle is associated with a number of expressions. One of the most challenging
issues on lexical disambiguation in South Asian languages is to resolve the status of the
discourse particles. In Bangla, discourse particles are typically functional and extremely
ambiguous. In Nepali, particles are too the phenomenal class in terms of non-inflectional
constructions and stand as free forms in a discourse. The Nepali particles are monosyllabic or
disyllabic words. /na/ is usually a common negative word in Bangla and simultaneously this
component also behaves as a particle and even as a topic marker in this language. Few particles
in Nepali too belong to the same category.
This paper is a comparative study between Nepali and Bangla regarding the similar particle /na/
and its equivalents in Nepali. On the basis of the data driven from Bangla and Nepali, the present
study shows that the Bangla negative word /na/ and its equivalents in Nepali work alike in the
languages subject to the tonal variations of the speakers. But inter language translation exhibits
that Nepali particles cannot always directly correspond to Bangla particle /na/. It results in a
variation though they reflectively occur in the same environment. We attempt to analyze also
syntactic distribution and pragmatic information of this parallel particle in both languages.
The aim of this paper will be to examine and explore the behaviour of the equivalent particles of
Bangla and Nepali language depending on the linguistic projection and assessment.
Manipuri Reflexive suffix -cə
H SURMANGOL SHARMA
Manipur University
Manipuri (also known as Meeteilon) is a Tibeto-Burman language mainly spoken in Manipur
state, India. Native Manipuri speakers inhabit in Assam and Tripura, too. The present paper
attempts to highlight some of the important functions of the suffix -cə ~ -jə ‘REFL’. Both
intransitive and transitive verbs can take reflexive suffix but the interpretation would be
different. For instance, tombə-nə kəytʰel-də cət-cə-y [Tomba-AGT market-LOC go-REFL-RL]
‘(For his own sake) Tomba goes to the market’. This is similar to what Chelliah (1997: 213-14)
mentions. And the example of transitive sentence is tombə-nə mə-tʰəntə pʰ -jə-y [Tomba-AGT
3P-self beat-REFL-RL] ‘Tomba beats himself’. In addition, the suffix is also seen to be used in
polite expression, for example, ə y cət-cə-re [I go-REFL-PERF] ‘I am leaving’. The sentence is
considered as a polite way of expression because the second person participant in the speech
event is identified as a respectable person may be due to his/her age, social position, rank, etc.
Among peer group or the second person participant is junior, lower social position/rank than the
speaker himself the expression would be simply as ə y cət-le [I go-PERF] ‘I am leaving’ Other
than that the paper would discuss about -cə ‘REFL’ provides the meaning as ‘something is
carried out without other’s help/assistance’, for example, əŋaŋ-du mə-kʰut-nə cak cá-jə-y [child-
DDET 3P-hand-INSTR cooked.rice eat-REFL-RL] ‘The child eats rice/food with his own hand’.
Last but not least, the paper would attempt to explore important syntactic constraints when the
verb is suffixed with -cə ‘REFL’, for instance, the following asterisked sentence is difficult to
interpret *əŋaŋ-nə cak cá-jə-y [child cooked.rice eat-REFL-RL]; however, əŋaŋ-nə cak cá-y
[child-AGT cooked.rice eat-RL] ‘Child eats rice’ is fairly acceptable.
Aspects of the Phonology of Himalayan Languages
RAJNATH BHAT
Banaras Hindu University, India
India is a tableau of languages, cultures, faiths, even so-called races and one comes across
striking richness of sound-systems in Indic languages. Indic is an umbrella term encompassing
the languages that are spoken in the Indian Sub-continent. These languages are commonly
considered to belong to Indo-Aryan (Indo-European), Dravidian, Munda (Austro-Asiatic),
Tibeto-Burman (Sino-Tibetan) and Andamanese language families. Himalayan languages from
Afghanistan to North-East India and Bhutan belong primarily to Indo-European or Sino-Tibetan
language families; The latter are numerically quite strong. The Sino-Tibetan languages are
spread across the ranges from Ladakh to Nagaland and Bhutan. The area will enable researchers
to explore segmental phonology, morpho-phonology, tonology, ‘tone-Sandhi’, stress assignment
patterns, and other aspects of phonology.
