Nepalese Linguistics Volume 31 November 2016 Editor-in-Chief Bhim Lal Gautam Editors Dr. Narayan Prasad Sharma Dr. Netra Prasad Paudyal Office bearers for 2016-2018 President Kamal Poudel Vice President Bhim Narayan Regmi General Secretary Krishna Prasad Chalise Secretary (Office) Prem Prasad Poudel Secretary (General) Kedar Bilash Nagila Treasurer Dr. Ambika Regmi Member Dr. Omkareshwor Shrestha Member Amrit Yonjan Tamang Member Indresh Thakur Member Dr. Tara Mani Rai Member Ekku Maya Pun Editorial Board Editor-in-Chief Bhim Lal Gautam Editors Dr. Narayan Prasad Sharma Dr. Netra Prasad Paudyal Nepalese Linguistics is a journal published by Linguistic Society of Nepal (LSN). LSN publishes articles related to the scientific study of languages, especially from Nepal. The views expressed therein are not necessarily shared by the committee on publications. 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CONTENTS GRAMMATICALIZATION THROUGH METAPHORICAL EXTENSION OF BODY 1-5 PARTS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY IN THADOU AND MEITEILON Ngaineiting Baite and Potsangbam Chaobimeena NOMINALIZATION AND RELATIVIZATION IN GYALSUMDO 6-13 Dubi Nanda Dhakal DIAGNOSING A CONTACT HISTORY FOR TSUM 14-20 Dubi Nanda Dhakal, Mark Donohue, Bhojraj Gautam and Naijing Liu MERONOMIC HIERARCHIES OF ‘BODY PART TERMS’ IN NEPALI 21-28 Vidyarati Joshi ADVERBIAL CLAUSES IN DHIMAL 29-38 Karnakhar Khatiwada GRAMMATICAL MOOD IN KISAN 39-43 Anup Kumar Kujur MOOD IN THARU: A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE 44-52 Krishna Prasad Paudyal MECHANISMS FOR COMULATION OF EXPONENTS 53-58 Tikaram Poudel FINITE STATE APPROACH TO NEPALI ADVERBS 59-62 Balaram Prasain NOMINALIZATION IN DUMI 63-70 Netra Mani Dumi Rai PARTICIPANT REFERENCING IN BHUJEL AND MAGAR KAIKE: A TYPOLOGICAL 71-75 PERSPECTIVE Dan Raj Regmi and Ambika Regmi HUMAN COGNITIVE ABILITIES AND SAFEGUARDING LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY 76-85 Anvita Abbi PRESIDENTIAL SPEECH 86-87 Bhim Lal Gautam LIST OF LIFE MEMBERS OF LINGUISTIC SOCIETY OF NEPAL 88-94 GRAMMATICALIZATION THROUGH METAPHORICAL EXTENSION OF BODY PARTS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY IN THADOU AND MEITEILON Ngaineiting Baite and Potsangbam Chaobimeena The paper shows instances of grammaticalization pragmatic significance, syntactic freedom and of body parts to spatial meanings, and explains phonetic substance.” the differences observed in Thadou and Meiteilon. Grammaticalization involves four main In Meiteilon, grammaticalization stops after interrelated mechanisms. They are: metaphorical extension of body part terms, whereas in Thadou, grammaticalization continues a. Desemanticization and came to be used as locative adverbs and temporal adverbs. Desemanticization is also known as semantic bleaching, where the semantic content of the Keywords: spatial, temporal, desemanticization, original word is lost partially, or completely in grammaticalization few cases. Here, concrete meaning of the original words are reinterpreted in specific contexts to give 1 Introduction more abstract and grammatical meanings. This The paper first discusses the theoretical process may be best explained through the background of grammaticalizationand give a very grammaticalization of body parts to spatial brief introduction of the languages to be compared meanings through metaphorical extension. i.e. Thadou and Meiteilon, which are both Tibeto- b. Extension Burman languages. The paper will move on to compare the data collected from both the As the name itself suggest, the meaning of the languages and therefore discuss the observations original word is extended. The context is and conclusions at the end of the paper. The generalized, or used in new context. This may comparison will be on how body part terms of sometimes occur together with desemanticization. both the languages get grammaticalized and For example, in English the preposition ‘in’ may which parameters were used, and to what extend be used in three different contexts – as a spatial does the grammaticalization process proceed. preposition, temporal meaning, and causal meaning, as shown in the following examples. 2 Grammaticalization (1) John died in London Grammaticalization theory is concerned with the genesis and development of grammatical forms. (2) John died in December Its primary goal is to describe how grammatical forms and constructions arise and develop through (3) John died in a car accident space and time. Grammaticalization is usually c. Decategorialization defined as the process whereby lexical items develop into grammatical items, and grammatical After undergoing desemanticization, the lexemes items develop into more grammatical forms. The may lose their original morphological and term ‘grammaticalization’ was first coined by the syntactic properties. When they undergo French linguist, Antoine Meillet in 1912. Meillet decategorialization, they may lose their defined grammaticalization as the evolution of morphological abilities to take inflections or grammatical forms (function words, affixes, etc) modifiers, and they may also lose their syntactic out of the earlier lexical forms. In simple words, it properties of being able to move freely in a is the process in which linguistic elements: sentence. The distal demonstrative ‘that’ in phonetics, morphemic, syntactic, semantic, etc English may be taken as an example. When the becomes constituents of grammar. According to demonstrative ‘that’ gets grammaticalized to a Heine and Reh, it is “An evolution whereby complementizer, it can no longer be pluralized, linguistic units lose in semantic complexity, and also lose ‘this’ as its co-member. Nepalese Linguistics , Vol. 31, 2016, pp. 1-5. 2 / Grammaticalization through… d. Erosion (or Phonetic reduction) speakers of Meiteilon in the neighbouring states such as Assam, Tripura and countries such as Erosion, also known as Phonetic Reduction, is the Myanmar and Bangladesh. Meiteilon also known last to apply in the grammaticalization process, as Manipuri, is the lingua franca of Manipur. and it is not obligatory. Here, a linguistic expression may lose its phonetic substance as a 3.2 Thadou result of grammaticalization. It may include the Thadou, as recorded in the Linguistic Survey of loss of full syllables as in English ‘because’ to India. Vol 3, Tibeto-Burman Family part 3 by ‘cuz’, or loss of suprasegmental properties as in Grierson (1903-1928), belongs to the Northern Adjective ‘full’ to derivational suffix ‘-ful’, or Kuki-Chin sub-group of Tibeto-Burman sub- phonetic simplification as in ‘going to’ to ‘gonna’. family which in turn belongs to the Sino-Tibetan In most of the mechanisms involved loss of family of languages. It is spoken mainly in properties are observed. However, there are gains Manipur, Nagaland and some parts of Assam, also, in that they get new existence. They can be Mizoram and Myanmar. used in new contexts with their meanings getting Thadou follows the Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) more generalized. word order. It is also a tonal language. “Thadou Grammaticalization is a unidirectional process. phonemic inventory consists of twenty nine The process involves change from lexical to phonemes, of which twenty one are consonants, grammatical, or grammatical to more grammatical eight vowels and three tones: rising (H), high forms, and not the other way round. Few falling (HL) and low falling (L)”. Pauthang contradictory examples of the unidirectionality (2008) hypothesis were found in few languages, but they 4 Metaphorical extension of body parts were discarded due to insufficiency of data, and also because they were too few as compared to the As already mentioned above, Desemanticization very large instances which conforms to the is one of the parameters where semantic bleaching unidirectionality hypothesis. occurs. One of the most important mechanisms contributing to semantic bleaching is It is observed from the mechanisms discussed metaphoricalextension. When a lexical source is above that grammaticalization is not an abrupt compared with the resulting grammatical change, but a gradual process where words leaves meaning, a metaphorical relation is often found. a particular class and enters another class by a The meaning of an entity is shifted from concrete gradual series of individual shifts forming a chain, to abstract by using metaphor and metonymy, but which is called a Cline. The stages involved the original meaning expressed is preserved in during the process may differ from language to some way or the other. Grammaticalization language, but there is a famous pattern of cline through metaphorical extension is often observed proposed by Hopper and Trauggot, which is found in body part terms. It may be noted that not all to be followed by majority of languages. metaphorical extensions contribute to Content word > grammatical word > clitic > grammaticalization. As already known, inflectional affix grammaticalization is not an abrupt change but a gradual process. Therefore, metaphorical use of This cline is popularly known as ‘the cline of body parts occurs first, as observed in almost all grammaticality’. languages of the world, but not all languages 3 About the languages grammaticalize the metaphors to mean spatial or temporal adverbs. In this paper study will be made 3.1 Meiteilon based on body part terms comparing instances Meiteilon belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language from two Tibeto-Burman languages. family, mainly spoken in the North-eastern