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Book Review North East Indian Linguistics Edited By Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area Volume 33.1 — April 2010 BOOK REVIEW NORTH EAST INDIAN LINGUISTICS EDITED BY STEPHEN MOREY AND MARK POST New Delhi, Cambridge University Press India, 2008 [Hardcover, 270 + xiii pp.; ISBN: 978-81-7596-600-0.; Rs. 695/$32] Deborah King The University of Texas at Arlington North East Indian Linguistics is a collection of descriptively-oriented articles representing a sampling of North East Indian languages. It was produced under the auspices of the North East Indian Linguistic Society (NEILS)* and edited by Stephen Morey and Mark Post of the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology at La Trobe University. This work seeks to lessen the understudied status of North East Indian languages and the dearth of associated literature by presenting the results of current research in an accessible format. It includes a broad spectrum of data which must be of interest to typologists as well as any linguist with a focus on the region of North East India or the Tibeto-Burman, Indo-Aryan, Tai- Kadai, or Austroasiatic language families. Despite this addition to the literature, there remains a dire need for fieldwork and data analysis in the diverse linguistic area of North East India. Many of the contributors to this work point readers to the insufficiency of extant knowledge to support conclusions of wider significance. Rather, their work is presented simply as the opening of a door leading to varied avenues of possible further research. Nevertheless, it is heartening that over half the contributors to the volume are Indian scholars, many from the North East region, who bring their cultural and mother tongue knowledge to bear on the language of study, and who carry an intrinsic stake in the description and preservation of these understudied and sometimes endangered languages. North East Indian Linguistics includes fifteen articles divided into groups by four overarching topics: 1) phonology; 2) lexicon; 3) morphology, syntax, and semantics; and 4) language description and language endangerment. The phonology section comprises four articles, two dealing with cross-linguistic phonological comparison, two primarily with tone. In “Kurtöp phonology in the context of North East India”, Gwendolyn Hyslop asks: Does North East India constitute a distinct linguistic area, and, if so, does Kurtöp fit within it? She compares the phonological features of Kurtöp, a Tibeto-Burman language of Bhutan, with those of eleven North East Indian languages from the Tibeto- * Editor’s note: The papers in this book were initially presented at the first conference of the North East Indian Linguistic Society. Refereed volumes of selected papers from the second and third conferences have also been produced, and there are plans to continue producing such volumes. See http://sealang.net/neils/ for more information. 95 96 Deborah King Burman, Tani, Indic, and Tai language families. While her data does not conclusively support North East India’s status as a linguistic area, Hyslop argues that Kurtöp’s inclusion of retroflex stops, a feature characteristic of South Asia, appears to place it outside of such a potential group. In “Change with continuity in the Boro-Garo languages”, Robbins Burling discusses phonological features which have been lost and reintroduced to the Boro-Garo languages Garo, Boro, and Tiwa. Some, such as syllable-initial /l/ and the high back unrounded vowel /ɯ/, have been reintroduced by borrowing (in Garo). Others, notably r-clusters (in Boro) and diphthongs (in Garo and Tiwa), have been reintroduced through phonological changes. Thus, the phonological similarities between these languages are not solely the result of common ancestry. Stephen Morey tackles the nature of tonal systems in North East India in “Working with tones in North East India – the tonal system of Numhpuk Singpho”. He argues that tones in Singpho are important primarily to distinguish otherwise homophonous words. Thus, when context makes clear the intended meaning, words are often pronounced without particular attention to the tone. This appears to be a result of Singpho’s shift away from monosyllabicity with a concomitant lowering of tone’s functional load. Finally, T. Temsunungsang examines two dialects of Ao, Chungli and Mongsen, in “Tonality and the analysis of sub-minimal words in Ao”. The author finds that while nouns in Chungli are minimally monomoraic with a single tone, verbs must be bimoraic and bitonal. Mongsen shows the opposite pattern: verbs are minimally monomoraic with a single tone, while nouns must be bimoraic and bitonal. Thus, nouns in Chungli and verbs in Mongsen seem to violate a proposed universal, that words must be disyllabic or bimoraic (McCarthy and Prince 1991). The second group of articles contains four pieces on the lexicon, two discussing the origins of lexical items, one regarding kinship terminology, and one positing a process of grammaticalization. In “Lexicon in a contact language: the case of Bishnupriya”, Shobha Satyanath and Nazrin B. Laskar show that the Bishnupriya lexicon comes from primarily Indo-Aryan (67%) and Meitei (21%) sources, with some other Tibeto-Burman (4%) and Persian and English influence (6%). However, the Persian and English forms are almost exclusively nouns, suggesting they entered the language through borrowing, whereas the Tibeto- Burman influence (including Meitei) extends to functional items, the result of a creole-like contact scenario. In a similar vein, Gérard Diffloth looks at an Austroasiatic (AA) language surrounded by Tibeto-Burman and Indo-Aryan languages in “Shafer’s ‘parallels’ between Khasi and Sino-Tibetan”. Previously, Shafer (1965) noted numerous Khasi words with Sino-Tibetan (ST) parallels. Diffloth divides Shafer’s lexemes into three basic sets, those with AA cognates, those with Northern AA cognates, and those without AA cognates at all. As the first set includes many basic terms, he suggests that these were likely part of an AA substratum which later shifted to ST, retaining some of the AA words in the process. The second set he leaves Review of North East Indian Linguistics 97 unexplained, while the third set he suggests passed into Khasi through borrowing. Bishakha Das’s article, “An exploratory study of the terms of relationship in Khamti of Lohit district in Arunachal Pradesh”, focuses on kinship terms. The author argues that Khamti’s extensive system of kinship terms is based on gender, generation, relative age, and kind of relationship. For example, the morpheme po1/2 indicates a male of one’s father’s generation, whereas me1/2 indicates a female of one’s mother’s generation. In the final article in this section, “Verbs of position, existence, location and possession and their grammaticalization pathways in the Tani languages”, Mark Post examines “special intransitives” in the Tani languages of Arunachal Pradesh (p. 128). Post describes five different types found in most Tani languages: the positional verbs ‘sit’, ‘lie down’, and ‘stand’, a verb of existence ‘live/exist’, and a verb of possession ‘have/exist’. As a result of semantic bleaching, these verbs now take copula-like inflection, rather than normal verbal inflection. Post suggests that these verbs began as the post-head element of a serial verb construction but have collapsed into a single word phrase, while also coming to be used as aspectual markers. The interrelated topics of morphology, syntax, and semantics are combined in the third section, which includes five articles. First, in “Causative prefixes in four Boro-Garo languages” U. V. Joseph demonstrates that the currently unproductive or semi-productive causative affixes in Boro-Garo languages have various allomorphs which were once governed by shared principles of phonological conditioning. In many cases, however, they have been replaced by currently productive causative suffixes. Next, is Seino van Breugel, “Similarities in verbal and nominal morphology in Atong”. In Atong, a select number of affixes can combine with both verbs and nouns, with distinct yet related meanings or functions. For example, -na acts as a dative marker on nouns, but as a purposive marker on verbs. Certain affixes, such as the negation marker -ca, combine with nouns only when the noun functions as a predicate, while the relativizer -gaba ~ -ga allows a verb to function like a noun. In “Temporality in Bishnupriya”, Nazrin B. Laskar finds that there are two tense markers in Bishnupriya, past/perfective and future/irrealis, and one aspect marker, imperfective, which is used only for present progressive and habitual actions and cannot combine with the tense markers. Laskar argues that the primary distinction in Bishnupriya is between realized action and unrealized action (in progress or potential). Next is an article by Dipima Buragohain on “Explicator compound verbs in Assamese and Kashmiri”. Explicator compound verbs (ECVs), an areal feature of South Asian languages, occur as partially delexicalized verbs which add some semantic content to their accompanying regular verbs. Buragohain compares ECVs in Assamese and Kashmiri in terms of their form, frequency, grammatical environments, and function. Although they are similar in many ways, the 98 Deborah King languages differ in that Assamese ECVs are more frequent, yet more grammatically restricted than Kashmiri ECVs. The final article in this section, “Explorations in the nonfinite verbal system in Asamiya”, by Runima Chowdhary, delineates features of nonfinite verbs as distinct from formally identical deverbal forms.
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