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

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 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 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 in Lamjung Yolmo LAUREN GAWANE & AMOS TEO 2. Phylogenetic Analysis of a few Languages of 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. 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 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 Sign Language Affiliation MIKE MORGAN 19. Sentence-final Particles in Dzolo Nàmùyì FUMINOBU NISHIDA 20. The “R” in Nusu: or ? 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 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 SHIHO EBIHARA 37. Spell Checker for Bodo: A Finite-State Automata Approach RAVIKUMAR RAGAM, BANEESSH N, SHANMUGAM R 38. Sounds and 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 in Nepali LAXI NATH KANDEL 49. Diminutives in 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 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 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 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 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 – 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 University (, 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, ), 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, ), 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 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; .g., the North- 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 (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 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= 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 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 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, 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 system and deictic verbs of motion is unique among the . 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 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 , 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 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 of the prefixes are highly restricted. Most of them are unstressed schwa /ə/ or high vowels /i, /, although Jingpho has 6 phonemes /i, e, a, , 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 . 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 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 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 , 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, 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 or in 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:

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 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 , 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. , 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 and 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 is headed by a functional element D, identified with the . The analysis in which D heads the noun phrase I call the “DP-analysis” (Abney 1987:3). Or, alternatively the difference between 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 , Thakur 2004 on ). 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 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) in Kind Terms. Linguistics and Philosophy 27, 393–450. Dayal, V. (2009). Semantic Variation and Pleonastic : The Case of the 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 . 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 (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: -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), (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 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: “ 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 , 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 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 spoken in middle and .

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 /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 of and in Sikkim is attempted in this paper.

The comments on the gradual loss of the 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 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 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 .

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, , 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 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 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 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 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, : 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 [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 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 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) 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 (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 mainly spoken in 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, , 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 , 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. 1 2 4 SVO order: kan [təm khəu ]VP “Kan grinds rice”

Compound word: təm2 khəu4 ( grind – rice) “de-husk”

Compound word: phun1 tok1 (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 -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 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 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’//‘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 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 & 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:

/haasii/ (fem) ‘big pair of tongs’ : /haasiyo/ (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.