INVESTIGATING DIFFERENTIAL CASE MARKING IN SÜMI, A LANGUAGE OF NAGALAND, USING LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION AND EXPERIMENTAL METHODS by AMOS BENJAMIN LENG YUAN TEO A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of Linguistics and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2019 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Amos Benjamin Leng Yuan Teo Title: Investigating Differential Case Marking in Sümi, a Language of Nagaland, Using Language Documentation and Experimental Methods This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Linguistics by: Scott DeLancey Co-Chairperson Melissa Baese-Berk Co-Chairperson Spike Gildea Core Member Kaori Idemaru Institutional Representative and Janet Woodruff-Borden Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded September 2019 ii © 2019 Amos Benjamin Leng Yuan Teo This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND. iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Amos Benjamin Teo Doctor of Philosophy Department of Linguistics September 2019 Title: Investigating Differential Case Marking in Sümi, a Language of Nagaland, Using Language Documentation and Experimental Methods One goal in linguistics is to model how speakers use natural language to convey different kinds of information. In theories of grammar, two kinds of information: “who is doing what (and to whom)”, the technical term for which is case or case role; and pragmatic information about “what is important”, have been assumed to be expressed by different means within a language. However, linguists have recently discovered that in numerous languages spoken in Australia, New Guinea, and South Asia, there are noun suffixes or enclitics that appear to simultaneously provide both case and pragmatic information. The existence of such systems suggests that our current theories of grammar need to be modified, though it is unclear how as we still know little about how these grammatical systems work. In this project, I looked at Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of North-east India, which has such a system of case marking. In this system, speakers do not consistently mark the subject of a transitive or intransitive sentence with an enclitic that conveys case iv information, but their choice depends on additional semantic and pragmatic factors. This was the first study of a Tibeto-Burman language to use a combination of new quantitative corpus methods with traditional linguistic fieldwork methods, including the recording, transcription, and tagging of spoken language, to identify semantic and pragmatic factors that are relevant to speakers’ choice of noun enclitic. In this study, some factors found to be relevant were: whether the sentence had a direct object or not; the animacy of the subject; and whether it was the first mention of a subject in connected speech or not. This was also the first study of a language with such a case system to include a perception study that investigated if intonation was used by native listeners to disambiguate whether a noun suffix was conveying either case or pragmatic information. This study showed that listeners were not using differences in intonation, but rather relied on the type of sentence the suffix occurred in to determine its meaning. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Amos Benjamin Leng Yuan Teo GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene University of Melbourne DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, Linguistics, 2019, University of Oregon Master of Arts in Linguistics, 2010, University of Melbourne Bachelor of Arts (Honours), 2007, University of Melbourne AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: Linguistic documentation and description Tibeto-Burman languages Phonetics (especially of endangered languages) Tone Prosody Linguistic typology Construction grammar Usage-based approaches to grammar PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: University of Oregon, Graduate Employee, 2013-2015, 2016-2019 University of Melbourne, Teaching Assistant, 2008-2012 vi GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: National Science Foundation DEL (Documenting Endangered Languages) Dissertation Improvement Grant, “Using language documentation and experimental methods to investigate differential A and S marking in Sumi, a language of Nagaland”, 2017-2019. Foundation for Endangered Languages grant, “Development of mother tongue literacy for the Sumi community in Nagaland”, 2013-2014. ELDP (Endangered Languages Documentation Programme) Small Grant, “Documenting traditional agricultural songs and stories of the Sumi Nagas”, 2011-12. Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research grant, “Documenting traditional agricultural songs and stories of the Sumi Nagas”, 2011-12. PUBLICATIONS: Teo, Amos. 2012. Sumi agentive and topic markers: No and ye. Linguistics of the Tibeto- Burman Area 35(1). 49-74. Teo, Amos. 2012. Illustrations of the IPA: Sumi (Sema). Journal of the International Phonetic Association 42(3). 365-373. Teo, Amos. 2013. Deverbal nominals in Sumi. In Gwendolyn Hyslop, Stephen Morey & Mark W. Post. (Eds.), North East Indian Linguistics, Volume 5. 192-209. Delhi: Cambridge University Press / Foundation. Teo, Amos. 2014. A phonological and phonetic description of Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland. Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics. Konnerth, Linda & Amos Teo. 2014. Acoustic-statistical and perceptual investigations of Karbi tones: A peculiar case of incomplete neutralisation of F0. In Gwendolyn Hyslop, Linda Konnerth, Stephen Morey & Priyankoo Sarmah (Eds.), North East Indian Linguistics, Volume 6. 13-37. Canberra: Asia Pacific Linguistics; equal authorship. Teo, Amos, Lauren Gawne & Melissa Baese-Berk. 2015. A case study of tone and intonation in two Tibetic language varieties. In The Scottish Consortium for ICPhS 2015 (Ed.), Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Glasgow, UK: The University of Glasgow. Paper number 893. vii Konnerth, Linda, Stephen Morey, Priyankoo Sarmah & Amos Teo. (Eds.) 2016. North East Indian Linguistics, Volume 7. Canberra: Asia Pacific Linguistics. Teo, Amos. 2017. The coding of identifiability in Mòòré. In Doris Payne, Sara Pacchiarotti & Mokaya Bosire (Eds.), Diversity in African languages: Selected papers from the 46th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (Contemporary African Linguistics 1). 41-61. Berlin: Language Science Press. Konnerth, Linda, Stephen Morey & Amos Teo. (Eds.) 2018. North East Indian Linguistics, Volume 8. Canberra: Asia Pacific Linguistics. Teo, Amos. 2018. Differential A and S marking in Sumi – synchronic and diachronic considerations. In Ilja A. Seržant & Alena Witzlack-Makarevich (Eds.), The Diachronic Typology of Differential Argument Marking. 381-400. Berlin: Language Science Press. Teo, Amos & Melissa Baese-Berk. 2019. Production and perception of focus in Sümi. In Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabain & Paul Warren (Eds.) Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia 2019. 300-304. Canberra, Australia: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc. viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I remain indebted to many people who are responsible for my education on Nagaland and the Sümi language, especially Dr Salome Kinny and her wonderful family. I am so grateful that the Sümi community has their own linguist in Dr Kinny, who has been an instrumental member of this project. I am also thankful to my first Sümi teacher, Inotoli Zhimomi, who I met more than a decade ago back in 2007 at the University of Melbourne, and all my subsequent teachers, especially H. S. Rotokha and Abokali Sumi, without whom the Sümi cultural documentation project would not have been possible. At the University of Oregon, my deepest thanks go to Scott DeLancey who found me wandering around the wilds of North-East India while I was searching for a graduate program. It wasn’t our first encounter, but my life would not be what it is today were it not for that fateful meeting in Guwahati at the Tamulis’ residence. My deepest thanks also go to Melissa Baese-Berk who allowed me to continue my interest in phonetics, while also expanding my training from speech production to speech perception. I am thankful every day for having her as a mentor and a friend. Special thanks go to my committee members Spike Gildea and Kaori Idemaru for invaluable feedback on data analysis and experimental design. But there are so many professors at the University of Oregon to whom I am grateful for having received an education and guidance from: Doris Payne, Tom Payne, Eric Pederson, Tyler Kendall, Charlotte Vaughn and Volya Kapatsinski. Thank you for making UO Linguistics such a special place. There are so many other people at the University of Oregon, past and present, who I need to acknowledge too. Special mention goes to Prakaiwan Vajrabhaya for ix brightening my first 5 years at in Eugene. Special thanks to Shahar Shirtz and Matt Stave for all the conversations we’ve had about linguistic analysis and typology. Thank you also to my fellow Tibeto-Burmanists Linda Konnerth, Krishna Boro, Marie-Caroline Pons, Zoe Tribur, Xuan Guan; my fellow fieldworkers Manuel Otero, Sara Pachhiarotti, Becky Paterson, Richard Griscom and Zalmai Zahir; and my fellow lab mates: Misaki Kato, Dae-yong Lee, Ellen Gillooly-Kress and Zack Jaggers. And to everyone else, including Jeff Kallay, Jessica Kosie, Becki Quick,