Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area Volume 29.2 — October 2006

REVIEW OF THE OF – A GRAMMAR AND TEXTS, BY STEPHEN MOREY, CANBERRA: PACIFIC LINGUISTICS, 2005

Mark Post La Trobe University

Keywords: Review, Stephen Morey, Tai, Phake, Aiton, Khamyang, Khamti, Ahom.

The volume under review is the first ever large-scale description of the Tai languages of North East , and treats the Assam-based Phake, Aiton and Khamyang varieties, as well as (to a limited extent) the Arunachali Tai variety Khamti and the basically extinct language Ahom. It is not simply “a grammar and texts”, as the title proposes, but is rather a comprehensive documentation of a language or languages (I will return to this point), some features of which include an extensive literature review, a dialect survey, an explication of scripts and ceremonial-literary traditions, the current versions of three already very substantial dictionaries-in-progress (as well as a digitization of a previously unpublished dictionary by another author), a descriptive grammar, and a far larger body of fully analysed and annotated texts than is usually found in works of this kind, in addition to many helpful ancillary materials such as large colour photographs, detailed maps and consultant biographies. The sheer scale of Morey’s presentation is made possible through the inclusion of an ingeniously conceived and designed CD-ROM, which not only contains the full text of the bound presentation (replete with numerous links and clickable cross-references), but includes sound files for nearly every example, and every text, to which the author 141 142 Mark Post makes reference, as well as numerous materials (such as the dictionaries and text analyses) which are simply too extensive to include in a printed work of acceptable size and cost. Morey’s work thus not only easily takes its place at the forefront of North East Indian Tai studies, it paves the way, and provides much of the necessary data, for extensive future research in the area. The main text of the presentation is in eleven chapters. Chapter 1 orients the reader, and is followed by an overview of the North East Indian Tai cultures and their languages in Chapter 2, a literature review in Chapter 3, theoretical and methodological considerations in Chapters 4 and 5 and an extensive phonological description and discussion of traditional scripts in Chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 8 is the main body of the grammar, entitled simply “syntax”, and the final Chapters 9-11 involve discussions of literary traditions (9) and corpus design (10-11) respectively. I will first discuss the contents of these chapters in order, then return to a more general appraisal of the work. Chapter 1 opens with a provocative discussion concerning the relative values of linguistic analysis of endangered languages and their documentation, and leaves the reader with no doubt as to where Morey’s sympathies lie. Although one can agree or disagree with Morey’s principles, his central claim cannot be ignored, and this is that many of the logistical limitations on language documentation suffered by scholars over the last several hundred years simply no longer apply. As Morey has demonstrated, the development of computer-based technologies and low-cost dissemination media have made it possible even for researchers with ordinary technological abilities and modest means to produce and disseminate a relatively large-scale language database. Doing so accomplishes at least three very important goals: it provides the reader with the ability to check the analyst’s claims against raw data, it provides other researchers with the ability to conduct further research of their own on the same data, and it provides the community which the author is serving with Review of Morey (2005) 143 a very direct voice in the overall process of research into their language. Chapter 1 also includes a helpful, if brief, overview of the Tai language “family”, situating the North East Indian Tai languages in the Shan group of Southwestern Tai, largely on the basis of tone category correspondences, as is customary. On the basis of some apparent non-correspondences with Northern Shan (Edmondson and Solnit 1997), Morey finds that the position of his target languages within Shan should be re-evaluated, although he leaves this ultimate evaluation to a future researcher. In §1.2.3, we move to a very brief discussion of what is to me one of the trickier aspects of the work (also to an extent discussed in Chapter 2, as well as elsewhere), which is the author’s methodological decision to in most places combine two Tai “languages”, Aiton and Phake (in several places also including the highly endangered Khamyang, as well as in a few places apparently also including Khamti), together into a single integrated presentation. Although all of the languages Morey discusses (with the possible exception of the extinct language Ahom) appear to be largely mutually intelligible, hence are, on linguistic grounds, “dialects of the same language”, there are important phonological and grammatical features that distinguish them, such as the position of the comparator morpheme (§8.3.2.2.1), the syntax of negation (as well as the form of the negator) (§8.4.3.1), the segmental phonologies (§6.2-§6.3), and lexical, grammatical and phrasal prosodies (i.e. lexical tone, grammatical-functional tone, and intonation, §6.2.4, §6.3.4, and §8 (several places)), to name but a few. The author has his reasons for presenting these languages en masse, and goes to lengths in many places to be clear as to the extent to which the “Tai languages” discussed herein are identical or in what ways they differ (particularly in the phonology chapter §6, in which the detailed treatments presented there are kept quite distinct). But he does not, and indeed can not, do this everywhere, and some readers may as a result feel uncertain in several places as to the precise extent to which certain generalizations made necessarily hold 144 Mark Post across all of the groups, or whether every feature discussed has been equally fully-investigated for all varieties. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss the cultural and linguistic situation of the Tai languages of North East India and previous analyses of them, respectively. Chapter 3 is wide in scope, and helpfully discusses numerous works which are difficult – in some cases all but impossible – to locate, whether one is a locally or internationally- based scholar. Of the works discussed, the author makes frequent further reference to Needham (1894), Banchob (1977; 1987) and Kingcom (1992), sometimes extensively representing their analyses. Again, although the author has stated his reasons for doing so, I found myself surprised at points at the extent to which he relied on these sometimes uneven works in preference to far more reliable works treating Tai languages which are less closely related to North East Indian Tai languages, as well as non-Tai languages with similar grammatical typologies. Not entirely unrelated to this is the author’s decision (mostly discussed in Chapter 6) to use different orthographies for the different Tai varieties examined; in particular, although he adopted an IPA-based orthography for Aiton, with some modifications, for Phake he maintained the in some ways idiosyncratic orthography of Banchob (1987). Although the value of maintaining consistency with previous sources is certainly a matter of opinion, it is this reviewer’s opinion that a single, consistent practical orthography used throughout the presentation would have made cross-variety comparison far simpler for the reader, and the documentation more user-friendly overall. Chapter 4 discusses “theoretical considerations”, and includes a brief overview of a few of the better known works in Tai studies, mentioning their different approaches to some perennially vexing questions in Mainland South East Asian linguistics, including grammaticalization and the lexical versus functional status of serialized verbs, functions and variability of constituent order, and constituent structure and the possibility of “discontinuous” constituents (topics which are all revisited in Chapter 8). Here and Review of Morey (2005) 145 elsewhere, the author is to be commended for his recognition that Tai functors – while clearly functional in nature – are not so deeply grammaticalized that they are no longer also analysable in terms of their (lexical) source semantics. I found his decision to represent putatively functional serialized verbs in terms of their erstwhile lexical meaning in CAPS to be, in general, a comfortable and insightful solution to a difficult representational problem. However I do not feel the same about his decision to gloss several morpheme types (generally, what appear to be constituent-final stance particles) as “PRT” (“Particle”) – in other words, to leave them largely unanalysed – particularly as the author is explicitly aware of their functional importance in Tai languages. Chapter 5 outlines the methodology employed by the author in the collection, analysis and translation of his extensive text database. In it, he discusses the nature and relative values of different types of linguistic data at length, and focuses in particular on an opposition – perhaps overly reductive, but Morey is hardly alone here – between “elicited” and “text” data. It is clear both from statements made in this work and from its overall composition that Morey feels far more comfortable relying on “text” than on “elicited” data, and I can find no intrinsic fault in this. That said, one might add a further cautionary note that even “text” data can be gathered under excruciatingly unnatural circumstances (the very presence of a non- native speaker could be argued to condition data, to say nothing of when that non-native speaker acts as the sole or principal interlocutor). On the other hand, at least some types of “elicited” data (for example, sentences in the language under investigation which are constructed and volunteered by the analyst, and which are rejected by consultants as unacceptable) can illuminate an analysis both from the point of view of the analyst and from that of the grammar reader. Ultimately, a good understanding of the nature and uses of various types of linguistic data is a complex skill which is in large part a function of the training, experience, and abilities of the fieldworker, and it is never enough to simply issue blanket 146 Mark Post endorsements or condemnations over entire methodological domains. In any case, and as long as disagreements continue to exist among linguists on these points, the ideal solution is precisely the one adopted by Morey in this work, and that is to diligently source every piece of data used, to be as open and explicit as possible as to how it was collected and for what purpose, and – wherever one can – to supply the data itself in as “raw” a form as possible. Chapter 6 contains one of the two most substantial pieces of analysis in the work, treating segmental, syllabic and prosodic phonology from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Here especially, the author’s decision to preserve rather than regularize both the orthographies and methods of presentation of other sources, while defendable, also presents some challenges to the reader. Two well-known problems in Tai phonology are addressed in some detail in this chapter, namely the questions of (1) whether vowel offglides are best analysed as diphthongs or as VC sequences, and of (2) whether glottal stops are phonemic or not. To (1), Morey presents arguments from phonetic realization, phonological distribution, and orthography, in favour of a diphthong analysis. The phonological argument is the better of these, in which the author shows that since vowel offglides are followed by consonants in Phake, as lYigq laiŋ2 A4 ‘light’ (< PT *lɛŋ ), the possibility of a final *CC constraint is removed, and with it all of the power and elegance of this traditional solution. It is important to note however, that *ɛŋ → aiŋ is a secondary development in Phake which is not found in most Tai languages, leaving the argument inapplicable to e.g. Standard Thai. To (2), the author argues against the tradition of transcribing a phonemic glottal stop, particularly as an onset to otherwise vowel- initial words. His main evidence includes omission (while glottal onsets are often omitted, (other) consonant initials are generally not) and the irrelevance of diachrony to synchronic phonological analysis (the fact that positing a glottal initial explains certain aspects of tone patterning is better expressed as a diachronic rather than a synchronic fact). While one might concede both arguments, one is Review of Morey (2005) 147 left in the author’s analysis with the idea that Tai phonology is the same in this respect to the phonology of e.g. English, or any other language without phonemic /ʔ/. This seems to me somewhat misleading. For one thing, in many Tai languages, as well as in some neighbours, the frequency of glottal stop onsets to otherwise vowel-initial words vastly outstrips that of e.g. English, in which onsets to the first syllable of a vowel-initial term are often loaned by the final consonant of a preceding term. For another, glottal stop omission in Standard Thai, at least, is an important and patterned feature of both synchronic (visible) and diachronic (already- accomplished) aspects of grammaticalization. For example, the D1 irregular development of Central Thai *cak ‘desire; intend’ > caØʔ ~ ca ‘future/irrealis’ (Haas 1964: 112; Diller 2001) arguably reflects caØk > caØʔ > ca rather than caØk > ca tout court. In addition, glottal stop onset-omission seems more likely to occur on functor morphemes (as in Morey’s illustrative example (2), p.112) than on lexemes. Whether one deals with these facts by positing a segment, following the “American” tradition represented by Gedney, Haas, and others, or a word prosody, as in the approach of Coupe (forthcoming) for a related problem in Ao Naga, they should be dealt with somehow. The remainder of the chapter includes fascinating, historically well-informed studies of the development of Aiton and Phake phonology (with close attention to tones, which are amply documented with pitch tracings and sound files), and to a lesser extent Khamyang and Ahom. In the interest of space, I will not discuss Chapter 7 except to say that it seems to me to include items of interest not only to Tai specialists, but to anyone interested in the maintenance and development of indigenous scripts as a crucial aspect of traditional language. Chapter 8 is the largest chapter in the work, and contains the bulk of its grammatical analysis. It is divided into major sections on typological profile (§8.1), lexicon, including word structure and functor classes (§8.2), phrasal constituents and their order (§8.3 and §8.4), predication, including predicate caseframes, TAM, and verb 148 Mark Post serialization (§8.5) and non-declarative constructions (§8.6), plus a small section on complex causatives and purposives (§8.7). Some of the major themes which are treated in passing throughout the chapter include the lexical versus functional status of particular morphemes and/or words, the degree of synchronic analysability of etymologically complex forms, and the principles that determine constituent order and marking. Of these various issues, one of the major advances made in this work seems to me to be in the area of constituent structure and order. As Morey notes in detail, authors since the early work of Robinson (1849) – whose data later formed the basis for Grierson’s influential (1966 [1904]) study – have consistently, and somewhat less-than- reflectively, described North East Indian Tai clause structure (principally, that of Khamti, which is less directly treated by Morey’s study) as “SOV”. Some have further suggested that a putative shift “SVO > SOV” might have come about as a result of language contact (the overwhelming majority of North East Indian languages, including, as far as I am aware, all the Tibeto-Burman and Indo- Aryan languages spoken there, are essentially verb-final). However, neither case has ever been convincingly argued. Much of the intrigue surrounds the prevalence in North East Indian Tai languages of “prepositional” markers of (most often) O argument NPs, many of which precede the predicate. Morey quite convincingly shows us that the function of these morphemes1 is most frequently to “mark” a highly animate but non-agentive core argument, aligning it closely with the “anti-ergative” marking identified by LaPolla (1992) for Tibeto-Burman. Often, these markers in Tai are found explicitly marking O or “I” (≅ “Indirect

1 The morphemes in question, Aiton/Phake hgq haN2 and ca caa2/cA5 (both glossed ‘to’), are seemingly no longer, if they ever were, available for use as main verbs or head nouns in any of the languages reported on here. The possibility of a past semantic contrast or present functional difference between them is not discussed in this work, and so remains an intriguing potential topic for further research. Review of Morey (2005) 149 Object”) NPs which precede the predicate for pragmatic reasons, being relatively high in topicality, while they are not present when less topical arguments occupy a post-predicate position (note also that Diller (1992), in his reanalysis of the extremely limited data set provided in Needham (1894), reached what seem to be compatible conclusions). Indeed, it is clear from Morey’s analysis that the pragmatic (topicality) and semantic (animacy/agentivity) status of referents plays a far greater role in the organization of sentence structure in North East Indian Tai languages (at least) than many previous analysts may have supposed. Topic-fronting is even effectively invoked to explain the phenomenon other analysts have dubiously (in this reviewer’s appraisal) described as “quantifier float”, in sentences like (1).

(1) em mnq woa lukq en kW ta AW sogq tuwq / mE2 mvn2 wA5 luk4 nj4 kau2 ta1 au2 sauN6 to2 wife 3sg say [child DEF] [1Sg] [will take] [two CLF] TOP A V O ‘The wife said: “I’ll take two of the children”.’ Phake example, Morey (2005: 267, ex. 113 (bracketing and constituent role assignment by the reviewer)).

In examples like (1), whose structure in most respects resembles that of the “split referent” construction described by LaPolla and Poa (in press) for Chinese, it has appeared to some analysts as though the O argument of ‘take’ lukq en luk4 nj4 ‘the children’2 occurs preverbally, with a coreferential quantifier phrase sogq tuwq sauN6 to2 ‘two CLF’ “postposed” as an afterthought. However, these two

2 Note that the phonemicization as given in Morey’s example (113) contains a typo, as nai4 ‘that’ should in fact read nj4 ‘DEF’; the correct phonemicization is given in the text transcription itself, which may be found in the accompanying CD- Rom. 150 Mark Post phrases in fact represent a more complex relation, in which lukq en luk4 nj4 refers anaphorically to a set of three children which have already been mentioned in the narrative, and sogq tuwq sauN6 to2 functions to narrow the reference to a subset of two thereof. Thus, it appears that lukq en luk4 nj4 in fact occurs preverbally for the purpose of establishing a topical “frame of reference”, while the properly referential expression sogq tuwq sauN6 to2 in fact occupies the canonical position of a focal O argument in the clause syntax. Additional work on this topic is certainly warranted, and Morey provides us with most of the necessary materials3. However, on the basis of both the data and analysis presented in this work, it is now possible to finally conclude that neither Aiton nor Phake, nor probably any of the North East Indian Tai languages at all, have grammaticalized a device for marking core transitive clause grammatical relations via arrangement in the basic order A-O-V, and that this longstanding but inadequately supported claim should accordingly be abandoned. The following subsections on clause types and predications are cogent and well-illustrated, although the “verb complex” may have been more appropriately described as a “predicate complex” in view of the fact that adjectives, which are analyzed elsewhere in this work as a major lexical class distinct from verbs, also occur as predicates. I am less thoroughly convinced by the author’s identification of two markers of “past tense” in North East Indian Tai, namely Aiton/Phake ka kaa1/kA1 ‘GO’ (a functional equivalent of post-head serialized ไป paj in Standard Thai, whose North East Indian Tai cognate apparently occurs as head or pre-head serial verb only) and Aiton/Phake ma maa2/mA2 ‘COME’ (apparently cognate with and functionally equivalent to Standard Thai มา maa). Although the author seems to me quite correct in identifying a functional

3 For example, a large-scale frequency count is something that might be conducted immediately; such methods were used to great effect by Sun and Givón (1985), when arguing against a putative “SVO > SOV” shift in Mandarin Chinese. Review of Morey (2005) 151 difference between them in terms of dissociation from or movement towards a temporal reference point (an artifact of their historical lexical semantics as motion verbs), it is less clear to me that these are tense-based rather than aspectual distinctions. Instances of their use in conspicuously non-past situations abound in the examples (including examples of co-occurrence with “future” marker ta ta1/ti1, as in p. 342, ex. (308)), as do clauses which clearly reference past time in which neither marker is used. Very much less frequent, if they occur at all, are instances of their use to describe non- perfected past events, suggesting that some form of perfectivity- marking may more accurately describe the functions of these very interesting morphemes. Which basically brings us full-circle; the main reason one is able to so quickly verify the author’s claims and/or develop alternative hypotheses is because he has provided all of the data, and in a more- or-less digitally-searchable format. In addition to the electronic files of the grammar chapters and texts, which open as .doc files and can be searched using compatible word-processing programs’ search functions, an online resource is provided at http://purl.oclc.org/assam-tai in which it is possible to query texts from multiple Tai languages, as well as from two Tibeto-Burman languages with important present and historical relations to the North East Indian Tai languages, namely Turung and Singpho. The ability to produce concordances is unfortunately not currently available using the materials provided, and the presentation is not absolutely seamless – for example, not all of the links provided actually do what they purport to, and it is sometimes cumbersome to manage several programs and files simultaneously, particularly on slower computers which may be prone to crashing. But one feels almost ashamed of making such criticisms in light of the overall advance to the field that the author’s presentation represents. All told, The Tai Languages of Assam is an extraordinary accomplishment. It will be an indispensable item for Tai-Kadai scholars and indeed all Mainland South East Asianists, to specialists 152 Mark Post in grammaticalization and morphological typology, as well as any scholars with interest in the integration of corpora into the presentation of linguistic analysis. Most importantly however, it provides us with a new model for the description of endangered languages which, if widely emulated, should have a profound and lasting impact on their study and preservation.

REFERENCES

BANCHOB BANDHUMEDHA พรรจบ พันธเมธา. 1977. ภาษาและหนังสือ คําไท ไทย ภาษาอายตอน [Language and Literature: Tai Words, Aiton Language]. Satri San (in Thai). Bangkok: Borisat kanphim Sattri san Cham kat. —. 1987. Phake-Thai-English Dictionary พจนานุกรมพาเก– ไทย– อังกฤษ Published by the author (in English and Thai). COUPE, A.R. Forthcoming. A Grammar of Mongsen Ao (Mouton Grammar Library 39). Berlin: Mouton. DILLER, ANTHONY. 1992. Tai languages in Assam: Daughters or ghosts? Papers on Tai Languages, Linguistics and Literatures, ed. by Carol J. Compton and John F. Hartmann, Paper #C, 5-43. DeKalb: Northern Illinois Centre for Southeast Asian Studies. —. 2001. Grammaticalisation and Tai syntactic change. Essays in Tai Linguistics, ed. by Kalaya Tingsabadh and Arthur S. Abramson, 139-175. Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University Press. EDMONDSON, JEROLD A. and DAVID B. SOLNIT. 1997. Introduction. The Tai-Kadai Languages: The Tai Branch, ed. by Jerold A. Edmondson and David B. Solnit, 1-27. Arlington: University of Texas. GRIERSON, SIR GEORGE A. 1966 [1904]. Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. 2: Mon-Khmer and Siamese-Chinese Families. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. HAAS, MARY. 1964. Thai-English Student's Dictionary. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Review of Morey (2005) 153 KINGCOM, PHRAMAHA WILAISAK. 1992. A comparative study of Standard-Thai and Tai-Phake spoken in Assam (India). Poona: Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute Dissertation. LAPOLLA, RANDY J. 1992. Anti-ergative marking in Tibeto-Burman. LTBA 15.1: 1-9. — and DORY POA. In press. On describing word order. In Catching Language: The Standing Challenge of Grammar Writing, ed. by Felix Ameka, Alan Dench and Nicholas Evans, 269-295. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. NEEDHAM, J. F. 1894. Outline Grammar of the . Rangoon: Superintendent of Government Printing. ROBINSON, W. 1849. Notes on the Languages spoken by the various Tribes inhabiting the Valley of Assam and its mountain confines. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal 18.1: 311-318, 342-349. SUN, CHAO-FEN and TALMY GIVÓN. 1985. On the So-Called SOV Word Order in Mandarin Chinese: A Quantified Text Study and Its Implications. Language 61.2: 329-351. 154

Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area Volume 29.2 — October 2006

REPORT ON THE 39TH ICSTLL: University of Washington, Seattle, September 15-17, 2006

Jamin R. Pelkey La Trobe University, Melbourne SIL International, East Asia Group

The 39th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (ICSTLL), hosted by the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle, found itself in the hands of an able craftsman. Principal organizer Zev Handel, with the help of his amicable postgraduate detachment, infused the event with sensible, yet aesthetic, efficiency from the first circular to the last supper. From a tasteful-but-functional webpage design to a careful-but-flexible scheduling of events, Handel’s detailed attention to form enabled conference participants to focus their attention on academic and interpersonal content during the three-day event. Researchers from 61 universities and institutes based in 16 countries around the world presented 92 papers to the conference representing studies on more than 50 languages in the Sinosphere and Indosphere. After a fruitful pre-conference workshop entitled ‘The Current State of ST/TB Reconstruction’ with papers presented by Robbins Burling, David Solnit, Martha Ratliff, Scott DeLancey, Zev Handel and James Matisoff, the formal conference commenced on Friday morning, the 15th of September, with welcome addresses from Handel and the Divisional Dean of Arts & Humanities Ellen Kaisse. Handel organized the paper presentations into two parallel sessions (three parallel sessions on Saturday afternoon) and 23

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