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A grammar of Mongsen Ao
Abstract
'A Grammar of Mongsen Ao', the result of the author’s fieldwork over a ten-year period, presents the first comprehensive grammatical description of a language spoken in Nagaland, north-east India. The grammatical analysis documents all the functional domains of the language and includes four glossed and translated texts, the latter being of interest to anthropologists studying folklore. Mongsen Ao is a highly agglutinating, mostly suffixing language with predominantly dependent-marking characteristics. Its grammar demonstrates a number of typologically interesting features that are described in detail in the book. Among these is an unusual case marking system in which grammatical marking is motivated by semantic and pragmatic factors, and a rich verbal morphology that produces elaborate sequences of agglutinative suffixes. Grammaticalisation processes are also discussed where relevant, thereby extending the appeal of the book to linguists with interests in grammaticalisation theory.
This book will be of value to any linguist seeking to clarify genetic relationships within the Tibeto-Burman family, and it will serve more broadly as a reference grammar for typologists interested in the typological features of a Tibeto-Burman language of north-east India.
... As already noted, there is a strong tendency for =mö 3 to co-occur with A participants, although we will see that this is not absolute. Considering some of the factors which might be responsible for hypothetical differential A-marking (as identified by Tournadre 1991, LaPolla 2004, Coupe 2007, and Chelliah 2009), Amarking often does occur with a zeroed P/R, as in (14-16). In most of these cases, the occurrence of =mö 3 might be viewed as a result of potential ambiguity resulting from expression of only one of the understood participants; however, the lack of P/R marking (i.e., =a 1 ) on the =mö 3 -marked participant would also tend to prevent misunderstanding. ...
... Your sons have beaten me!"... ' (28.11) A number of other potential factors, such as volitionality of the A (Coupe 2007) or unexpectedness of the activity (Coupe 2007 andChelliah 2009), do not appear to be an issue in Khumi. Arguably, foregrounding is already a sufficiently abstract notion to accommodate these senses, as well. ...
... Your sons have beaten me!"... ' (28.11) A number of other potential factors, such as volitionality of the A (Coupe 2007) or unexpectedness of the activity (Coupe 2007 andChelliah 2009), do not appear to be an issue in Khumi. Arguably, foregrounding is already a sufficiently abstract notion to accommodate these senses, as well. ...
... A key question for further study is whether the ergative and agentive marking found in the Tibeto-Burman area are a part of historical Tibeto-Burman or a language contact phenomenon. There are some strong similarities in the accounts of such marking in the Tibeto-Burman area (Coupe 2007;Chelliah 2009;Hyslop 2010;Genetti 2007;Tournadre 1991; and those in the current volume); however, many of these languages are in contact with ergative languages of the Himalayas. The Na have long been in contact with Tibetan, Newar, and Indic languages through their work as traders along trade routes which extend through Lhasa to Kathmandu and Delhi. ...
... As an agglutinative language, derivation is a very prominent word-formation process in spoken Mongsen (cf: Coupe, 2007;Walling, 2017 Here, in both Poetic Mongsen and Longjang Mongsen, the superlative is a particle affixed to the stem "old". However, in Chungli, the superlative is not distinctly marked but fused with the stem. ...
The study "Poetic Mongsen: History, Culture, and Language" explores the unique characteristics and cultural significance of Poetic Mongsen, a song language of the Ao people from Nagaland, India. Unlike the spoken Ao languages (Mongsen, Chungli, and Changki), Poetic Mongsen is solely a sung language, historically used in traditional songs, ballads, and folk narratives. The language, now nearly extinct, holds immense cultural value, linking the Ao community to their historical and social practices. The paper documents and delves into the history and culture significance of the songs and the language. It also briefly examines the phonological and morphological differences between Poetic Mongsen and its spoken counterparts, highlighting its unique linguistic features. Additionally, it explores the decline of Poetic Mongsen due to the advent of Western education and Christianity, which overshadowed traditional practices. Finally, it concludes with efforts made to revitalize this language, such as government schemes and community-based initiatives, are discussed, emphasizing the importance of preserving this cultural heritage for future generations. Through this study, the authors aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of Poetic Mongsen’s role in the Ao people's identity and cultural continuity .
It has been shown that linguistic features of main and dependent clauses in complex sentence constructions may show different degrees of association strength giving rise to a number of cross-clausal associations. While this domain has been explored for the most part in corpus-based studies in individual languages, it has received little attention from a typological perspective. The present study makes inroads into this territory by exploring cross-clausal associations of one complex sentence construction in typological perspective: Counterfactual conditionals (e.g., if you had gone, you would have seen her ). In particular, special attention is paid to the interaction of clause-linkage patterns, TAM markers, iconicity of sequence, and ‘but’ clauses in counterfactual conditionals in a sample of 131 languages. By using a hierarchical configural frequency analysis, we identify a number of preferred and dispreferred cross-clausal associations in counterfactual conditionals that we explain from a functional perspective.
This paper studies the four distinct native terms for ‘corpse’ attested in Gyalrongic languages. Through comparative analysis, it establishes the sound correspondences among cognates and proposes preliminary reconstructions. In a second step, it hypothesises on the origins of the etyma by examining potential cognates in other Sino‐Tibetan languages. Two shared innovations can be found in the etyma for ‘corpse’. First, the Situ form *m‐g[á]m is an innovated compound meaning ‘a person that is killed’; and second, the etymon *rə̆.quʶ is a shared innovation of Horpa and Tangut. By analysing the etymologies above, this paper aims to enhance our understanding of sound correspondences and changes within the Sino‐Tibetan language family. Furthermore, it seeks to demonstrate the crucial role that etymological studies play in historical linguistics and language subgrouping. Despite their importance, such studies have not yet received sufficient attention from scholars specialising in Sino‐Tibetan languages.
proposed a model of five different types of non-realization marking as a crosslinguistic category, i.e., apprehensional, avertive, frustrated initiation, frustrated completion, and inconsequential. This study describes the corresponding markers in Korean and suggests that a new category, i.e., oscillative-frustrative, be added to the non-realization typology. The developmental patterns of non-realization markers in Korean are largely consonant with the patterns reported in other languages, but a few unique instances are also observed. Most notably, Korean has a set of 'oscillative-frustratives', which is not subject to tense-restriction and encodes non-realization, signaling repeated movements towards the target and cessations thereof. This unique type warrants recognition as constituting a new category of non-realization marking.
The lexicalization of perception verbs has been of widespread interest as a route into understanding the relationship between language and cognition. A recent study finds global biases in colexification patterns, suggesting recurrent conceptual associations between sensory meanings across languages. In this paper, drawing on a balanced sample of 100 languages, we examine cross-modal semantic associations in word formation. Confirming earlier proposals, we find derived verbs are lower on a proposed Sense Modality Hierarchy (sight > hearing > touch > taste, smell) than the source perception verbs on which they are based. We propose these findings can be explained by verb frequency asymmetries and the general tendency for sources of derivations to be more frequent than their targets. Moreover, it appears certain pairings (e.g., hear–smell) are recurrently associated via word formation, but others are typologically rare. Intriguingly, the typological patterning partially diverges from the patterning reported for colexification in the same domain. We suggest that while colexification is driven by conceptual resemblance between sensory meanings, cross-modal word formations tend to arise from grammaticalization processes of lexical specification, where additional material (e.g., a sensory noun) is collocated to a polysemous verb in order to disambiguate it in context. Together, these processes can account for the typological similarities and divergences between the two phenomena. More generally, this study highlights the need to consider conceptual, communicative and diachronic factors together in the mapping between words and meanings.
Two 1st person singular pronouns, #ŋa and #ka, are reconstructed for Proto-Trans-Himalayan. The functions of these roots and the relation between them in the proto-language have not been definitively established. Other work has presented a distinct case for a 1st person plural #ka in PTH . This paper compares the evidence for 1st person singular and plural #ka and argues that they are the same root, which in some languages has shifted from plural to singular function.
South Central Tibeto-Burman (also known as Kuki-Chin) forms a group of fifty languages spoken in the border area of Bangladesh, India and Burma. Due to their geographic distribution, speakers of South Central (SC) languages are in close contact with the superstrate languages, Bangla, Hindi and Burmese. The inevitable consequence of this longstanding contact on lesser-known languages of this region is understudied, especially structural diffusions. This paper presents a detailed discussion on relative-correlative (RC-CRC) construction in Hyow, a Southeastern SC language spoken by approximately four thousand people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, where they are in close contact with Bangla and Marma (a dialect of Burmese). This empirical study demonstrates how RC-CRC construction in Hyow is structurally and distributionally similar to those in IA languages, taking a critical look at the existing literature on IA languages and using data therein for a comparative study. In doing so, this paper provides examples from Bangla, Hindi and Sanskrit, and refutes some of the observations made in previous scholarly works. This paper also explores how they might have developed in Hyow, which otherwise uses a nominalization as native strategy for forming relative clauses. Even though most part of this paper discusses the RC-CRC constructions in Hyow as a consequence of language contact, this paper presents new insights on RC-CRC constructions in Bangla as well comparing to other IA languages.
The study discusses the outcomes of the contact and diffusion in two contact varieties of Assamese with respect to classifiers. The findings suggest that while classifiers have remained remarkably stable in their characteristics in Assamese over the past 160 years, during the same period, one of the contact varieties (Nagamese) has significantly diverged from the source language, and the other variety (Nefamese) displays greater continuity. The divergence in Nagamese is attributed to the substratal effect which has altered its characteristics associated with numerals and quantifiers in the source language, thereby making it more congruent with the host Naga languages. By concentrating on a smaller part of the region spanning three contiguous states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Nagaland from Northeastern India, the findings also help unlock in small ways the mysteries surrounding the diversity of classifiers arising out of areal diffusion.
Using arguments based on the data on verb agreement (pronominalization) in Tibeto-Burman, LaPolla 1989 (see also LaPolla 1992) argues that Proto-Tibeto-Burman should be reconstructed as a language with no inflectional morphology. In that paper it is argued that the Proto-Tibeto-Burman system of grammatical relations, was closer to the typical'role-dominated'(Van Valin & Foley 1980) Burmese-Yipho system (epitomized by Lahu, see Matisoff 1973). That is, a system where there is no definable'subject'or'direct object'; a system where semantic and pragmatic principles govern the organization of discourse, not syntactic functions. In this paper we look at the nature of'objects'in Tibeto-Burman languages, and here also find support for this view of Proto-Tibeto-Burman grammatical relations. From a survey of ninety-five reliable grammars or descriptions of languages in the Tibeto-Burman family, I found eleven languages with no nominal object marking, twenty languages with nominal morphology consistently marking the patient as object, regardless of clause type, and sixty-four languages with a type of marking where the patient in monotransitve clauses is often or always marked with the same postposition as the goal or beneficiary (dative) in ditransitve clauses. This type of marking is discussed in Dryer 1986 as Primary Object marking. I argue that this type of marking in the Tibeto-Burman languages reflects the semantically based nature of grammatical relations in Proto-Tibeto-Burman.
Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1986), pp. 387-400
Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D)--University of California - Berkeley, 1982. Includes bibliographical references (p. 307-312). Photocopy.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of London, 1967. Includes bibliographical footnotes and index.
Non-systemic ergativity, anti-ergativity, and grammaticalization in Yongning Na (Mosuo
- Lidz
- Liberty
Lidz, Liberty. 2008. “Non-systemic ergativity, anti-ergativity, and grammaticalization in Yongning Na (Mosuo)”. Paper presented at the 41st International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, December 18-21 SOAS, London
A Grammar of Meithei
- S Chelliah
Chelliah, S. 1997. A Grammar of Meithei. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.