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Verbs of position, existence, location and possession and their grammaticalization pathways in the Tani languages
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In some languages, existential, locative and possessive predications are handled by verbs, verbal auxiliaries or copulas with tailored existential, locative or possessive meanings such as 'be (at)' 'live', 'have' or 'exist'.
In other languages, some or all of these functions may be coded by verbs of posture or orientation such as 'sit' 'stand' and 'lie down', among others (cf. several papers in Newman 2002; also Hellwig 2003). Often, existential, locative or possessive predicate selection in the second type of language depends on, or makes reference to, some inherent properties of the focused referent (i.e., the existee, locatee, or possessed), and/or its orientation in space (i.e., in terms of the speaker's construal of the
situation). Aikhenvald (2000: §6.2.3) has described this operation as 'classificatory', as it basically reflects the same semantic and pragmatic principles governing selection of numeral or nominal classifiers in languages which have them
Predicate derivations in the Tani languages: root, suffix, both or neither?
No full textIt is common among the more-or-less synthetic and agglutinating Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages of the Eastern Himalaya2 to find large sets of semantically rich predicate formatives which function to structurally expand and semantically modify the predicate stem. In example (1) from Lare Galo, a Western (Transitional) Tani language spoken in central Arunachal Pradesh, North East India, the forms in question and their nearest English translations are in bold, as they will be throughout this article
Topographical deixis and the Tani languages of North East India
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In this paper, I will introduce the term topographical deixis to describe this sort of system as it is found in the Tani languages, which constitute a medium-sized branch of Tibeto-Burman languages spoken primarily in Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, North East India, as well as in small
numbers in Tibet (Sun 1993). Although a survey of topographical deixis and related systems in Tibeto-Burman has been initiated and remains ongoing (Post in preparation), in this paper I will mainly restrict
discussion to an explication of the system as it operates in those Tani languages which exhibit it. The paper is thus primarily descriptive in intent, and may also, I hope, be used as a benchmark reference for the study of similar and possibly related systems in other North East Indian
languages.
The remainder of the paper has the following structure: §2 discusses the environmental context of the Tani languages. In §3, we outline the basic characteristics of a system of topographical deixis, also discussing its hypothetical origins and semantic extensions. §4 presents a detailed
overview of the system of topographical deixis found in Lare Galo, based on the recent description of Post (2007), and §5 discusses the status of topographical deixis in other Tani languages
Classifiers in Mising
No full text[Extract] Mising is an underdescribed language from the Eastern Tani branch of the Tani subgroup Tibeto-Burman (Figure 1). It is currently spoken by approximately 587,310 Mising tribes peoploe living primarily in eight distrivts of upper Assam, namely Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Sibsagar, Jorhat, Golaghat, Dhemaji, Lakhimpur, and Sonitpur (Census of India 2001). There are at least nine regional varieties of Mising: Pagro, Delu, Ojam, Saajan, Moojin, Dambug, Samuguria, Tamargoja and Bonkual, of which the last three groups have largely adopted Assamese (an Indo-Aryan language) in preference to Mising for the majority of language situations
Quest for a script
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Arunachal Pradesh is a land of great cultural and linguistic diversity. Situated on the extreme North-eastern part of the Union of India, it shares international borders with the People's Republic of China on the north, Myanmar on the East and the Royal Kingdom of Bhutan on the West.
Its geographic link to the rest of India is from the south via Assam. Arunachal Pradesh is spread over 83,743 sq. km. As per the Provisional Population Census of 2001 the population of the state is approximately twelve lakh (1.2 million). In Table 1 we reproduce the population count
of the districts of Arunachal Pradesh
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