Argument indexation in Hakhun Tangsa

2017

This dissertation presents a comprehensive description of Hakhun Tangsa. Hakhun Tangsa is one of around eighty ethnic and linguistic communities called Tangsa or Tangshang. Hakhuns live mostly in Arunachal Pradesh, India, and in Sagaing Division, Myanmar. The number of speakers is estimated at around ten thousand. Hakhun is a Tibeto-Burman language, and it forms a subgroup with Nocte, Wancho, Phom, Konyak, Chang, and Khiamngan called Konyak or Northern Naga. Hakhun is a tonal language with twenty-two consonants, six vowels, and a simple syllable structure. Open word classes include Nouns and Verbs; property concept terms form a subclass of verbs. Noun roots are mostly monosyllabic, and most multisyllabic nouns are compounds. Nominal morphology includes prossessive prefixes and a set of semantically specific suffixes. Case is coded by postpositions. Verb roots are also mostly monosyllabic. A few verbs have suppletive stems. Verb serialization is common, and expresses complex events like resultative and sequential. A few grammaticalized verbs/elements contribute abstract meanings like phase, associated motion, causative, benefactive, etc. Typical verbal categories are expressed by independent particles. The most extensive and grammatically obligatory set consists of single syllable particles called operators, which express verbal categories like tense, mood, deixis, negation, inverse, and argument indexation. The typical argument indexation pattern is hierarchical. Deviations from this pattern is used to express certain pragmatic effects like affectedness and politeness. Non-verbal clauses may take overt copulas depending on tense and polarity. Most semantic distinctions, such as equation, property-concepts, quantification, simulation, and location are expressed by the nominal strategy. Existential and possession are expressed by a distinct strategy. Typical verbal clauses include intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive; less typical ones include weather condition, sensation-emotion, reflexive, reciprocal, and ‘need’ constructions. Person-based split-ergativity is seen in case marking, where first and second person singular arguments follow accusative, and the rest ergative alignment. Accusative alignment is also found in argument indexation in non-final clauses. The object alignment is indirective in case marking. Complement clauses include sentence-like, non-finite, and infinitive complement clauses. Adverbial clauses include various kinds of temporal clauses, temporal/conditional clauses, counterfactual, concessive, purpose, and substitutive clauses. Clause chaining (medial-final) is prevalent. Independent sentences are linked through tail-head linking and through connectives.

Both the preverbal and the postverbal indexation paradigms show typologically unusual morphological behavior. Both systems pose descriptive difficulties in that they do not fit neatly into predefined concepts of affixation and agreement. Following Haspelmath (to appear), it is better to refer to these systems as argument indexation than verb agreement. Besides the general arguments which Haspelmath presents, both the preverbal and the postverbal argument indices in Kuki-Chin are of very ambiguous morphological status, different in meaningful ways from the Indo-European-type systems which many people immediately think of when hearing the term "verb agreement".

CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT JOURNAL, Year 25, No. 39, pp.38-52, 2011

The main purpose of this paper is to look at the clause combining strategies in Bhujel, a seriously endangered Tibeto-Burman language mainly spoken in some of the villages in Tanahun district of Nepal. From formal and functional perspectives (cf. Lehmann 1988, Payne l997, Givón 2001 and Haspeimath 2004), a natural language makes use of mainly two types of morphosyntactic strategies which are traditionally referred to as subordination and coordination. In the domain of subordination, Bhujel employs topologically interesting morphosyntactic strategies in the complex expressions such as complement clauses, adverbial clauses, and relative clauses. Such clauses are exclusively controlled by a verbal form, finite or non-finite, including nominalized clauses. Bhujel, similar to most of the South Asian languages, typically employs non-finite subordinate clauses to realize clause chaining. In the domain of coordination, the clauses in Bhujel may be combined by one or more coordinators. Interestingly, they may be simply juxtaposed without any coordinators. To sum up. Bhujel employs different morphosyntactic strategies to show functional-syntactic continuum of clause integration: most integrated to least integrated.

2021

Chen (Bodo-Konyak-Jingphaw, Tibeto-Burman) is an undocumented language of the Konyak ethnic group. It is spoken in northeast India and northwest Myanmar. This article provides a first description of the Chen simple argument and clause structures. Chen argument structures include both noun phrases and pronouns, which can both take case markers. Other noun phrase modifiers include demonstratives, possessors, adjectives, nouns, a plural marker, quantifiers, and gender markers. Chen adjectives are formed from attributive forms in combinations of ʔa-V-pe, ʔa-V, Vpe, and ho-V. The pronoun inventory includes personal, interrogative, and demonstrative pronouns. Simple clauses exhibit SOV word order and include intransitive, transitive, ditransitive, attributive, and copula constructions.

International Journal of Linguistics, 2017

This study discusses about sentence structure of Balinese language. For the analysis, inductive approach is considered to be important for this study as every language has its particular characteristics described based on the inductive approach. Based on the analysis it was found that predicate of Balinese simple sentences may be filled by verb and non-verb, such as noun, adjective, number, adverb. The number and function of the argument is different among the different predicates. The predicate filled by noun, adjective, adverb, number, and intransitive verb requires one argument functioning as the subject of sentence. Two arguments are required by transitive verb especially mono transitive verb. The two arguments can be the subject and object, the subject and complement, or the subject and adverbial. Meanwhile, di-transitive verb requires three arguments and they can be the subject, indirect object, and direct object, or the subject, object, and complement.

Revue québécoise de linguistique, 1991

The aim of this article is to give an account of the characteristics of the Quechua verbal affix ku. It addresses the question of whether constructions that are reputed to be cases of syntactic NP-movement in other languages can be analyzed in the same way in Quechua. It is claimed that Quechua does not allow the external position to remain without a theta-role in Predicate Argument Structure, in that way excluding syntactic NP-movement. The effect of ku can be described as: co-index an internal argument with the external position in the mapping from Lexical Conceptual Structure to Predicate Argument Structure. In that way the projection of verbs, that in other languages subcategorize for an empty external position, is licensed.

2014

The origin of the research idea of this thesis comes from a feature discovered through fieldwork on Bugis, a Western Malayo-Polynesian language. In this language, two different word orders are possible: in the basic order, different affixes occur on the verb and the arguments, while the non basic order receives no marking. The goal of this thesis is to examine some unrelated languages in order to find out if, with different word orders, there is any difference in marking. Seven languages belonging to different families and areas have been chosen for this purpose: Tuvan (South Siberian Turkic), Lao (Tai, Tai-Kadai), Figuig Berber (Berber, Afroasiatic), Itonama (Amazonian isolate), Savosavo (Papuan), Madurese (Western Malayo-Polynesian, Austronesian) and Santali (Munda, Austroasiatic). The obtained results indicate that most languages show some different marking with different word orders, and a few languages that do not, have a rigid word order that does not allow changes. The changes in marking are not as obvious as in Bugis except in Madurese, which shows a high interaction between marking and word order. Moreover, the fact that clauses with the basic word order receive more marking occurs also in Figuig Berber. Further research with many more languages would be needed in order to discover if this feature may be common cross linguistically, given that the low number of the studied languages does not allow cross linguistic generalisations.

2019

This chapter discusses grammatical relations (GRs) in Balinese (ISO 639-3: ban, Austronesian, spoken by ~3 million, mainly in Bali, Indonesia). It is demonstrated that Balinese typologically shows relational properties typical for the Indonesian type of Austronesian languages, in terms of voice marking, argument marking, GR alternations, and other related processes such as relativisation, reflexivisation and control. In a wider typological context, Balinese shows splitS in terms of verbal morphology. Syntactically the overall grammar of Balinese shows a symmetrical alignment system: actor (A) and patient (P) arguments of transitive verbs can be equally selected as the grammatical subject or Pivot without the demotion of the other. In addition to voice morphology (showing AV, UV, and middle alternations), Balinese also has applicative and causative morphology, which is good evidence that semantic roles and surface grammatical relations are organised as two distinct layers in the grammar. It is demonstrated in this chapter that much of Balinese syntax revolves around the notion of the privileged argument of Pivot, and its related morphosyntactic and morphosemantic properties in the voice system, in both simple and complex structures; e.g. in clausal argument with/without control and adverbial clauses. We start with the distinction between grammatical relations and grammatical functions (section 2), followed by the selecting properties of Pivot (section 3). Balinese grammar also exhibits a set of properties distinguishing core arguments from obliques, discussed in sections 4 and 5. Three-place predicates are discussed in section 6. It is shown that Balinese exhibits a secundative alignment. Adjuncts are very similar to obliques but they are different in certain respects (section 7). Clausal dependants (complements and adverbial clauses) are discussed in sections 8-9. A conclusion is given in section 10.

This paper is case study of three-argument verbs in the Southeastern subbranch of Kiranti, a Sino-Tibetan group of language spoken in Nepal. The data that we have available for exploring ditransitives comes from two languages of the group: Chintang and Belhare.