North East Indian Linguistics 8 (NEIL 8)

This is the eighth volume of North East Indian Linguistics, a series of volumes for publishing current research on the languages of North East India, the first volume of which was published in 2008. The papers in this volume were presented at the 9th conference of the North East Indian Linguistics Society (NEILS), held at Tezpur University in February 2016. The papers for this anniversary volume continue the NEILS tradition of research by both local and international scholars on a wide range of languages and topics. This eighth volume includes papers on small community languages and large regional languages from across North East India, and present detailed phonological, semantic and morphosyntactic studies of structures that are characteristic of particular languages or language groups alongside sociolinguistic studies that explore language attitudes in contexts of language shift

North East Indian linguistics 6

The papers for this volume were initially presented at the sixth and seventh meetings of the North East Indian Linguistics Society, held in Guwahati, India, in 2011 and 2012. As with previous conferences, these meetings were held at the Don Bosco Institute in Guwahati, Assam, and hosted in collaboration with Gauhati University. The present collection of papers are testament to the ongoing interest in North East India and continued success and growth in the community of North East Indian linguists. As in previous volumes, all the papers here were reviewed by leading international specialists in the relevant subfields. This volume, in particular, highlights the recent research of many scholars from the region. Out of eleven contributions, eight are from North East Indian scholars themselves. This book therefore brightly shines light on the work being done by North East Indian linguists on the languages of their own region. The remaining contributions are authored by international scholars from Australia, Singapore, Germany/USA, and Nepal

Studying tones in North East India: Tai, Singpho and Tangsa

Drawing on nearly 20 years of study of a variety of languages in North East India, from the Tai and Tibeto-Burman families, this paper examines the issues involved in studying those languages, building on three well established principles: (a) tones are categories within a language, and the recognition of those categories is the key step in describing the tonal system; (b) in at least some languages, tones are a bundle of features, of which (relative) pitch is only one; and (c) tones may carry different levels of functional load in different languages. I will discuss the use of historical and comparative data to assist with tonal analysis, while raising the possibility that the tonal categories of individual words may vary from one language variety to the next. Different approaches to marking tones, for linguistic transcriptions, presentation of acoustic data (F0) and in practical orthographies are discussed, along with the effect of intonation and grammatical factors such as nominalisation on the realisation of tones. *This paper is in the series How to Study a Tone Language, edited by Steven Bird and Larry HymanNational Foreign Language Resource Cente

North East Indian linguistics 7 (NEIL 7)

This volume includes papers presented at the seventh and eighth meetings of the North East Indian Linguistics Society (NEILS), held in Guwahati, India, in 2012 and 2014. As with previous conferences, these meetings were held at the Don Bosco Institute in Guwahati, Assam, and hosted in collaboration with Gauhati University. This volume continues the NEILS tradition of papers by both local and international scholars, with half of them by linguists from universities in the North East, several of whom are native speakers of the languages they are writing about. In addition we have papers written by scholars from France, Japan, Russia, Switzerland and USA. The selection of papers presented in this volume encompass languages from the Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic, Indo-European, and Tai-Kadai language families, and describe aspects of the languages� phonology, morphosyntax, and history

North East Indian Linguistics 7 (NEIL 7)

This volume includes papers presented at the seventh and eighth meetings of the North East Indian Linguistics Society (NEILS), held in Guwahati, India, in 2012 and 2014. As with previous conferences, these meetings were held at the Don Bosco Institute in Guwahati, Assam, and hosted in collaboration with Gauhati University. This volume continues the NEILS tradition of papers by both local and international scholars, with half of them by linguists from universities in the North East, several of whom are native speakers of the languages they are writing about. In addition we have papers written by scholars from France, Japan, Russia, Switzerland and USA. The selection of papers presented in this volume encompass languages from the Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic, Indo-European, and Tai-Kadai language families, and describe aspects of the languages’ phonology, morphosyntax, and histor

Desegmentalization: towards a common framework for the modeling of tonogenesis and registrogenesis in mainland Southeast Asia with case studies from Austroasiatic

Suprasegmental contrasts of tone and register are commonplace phonological phenomena among the languages of Mainland Southeast Asia and its periphery (MSEA) (Matisoff 1990, 2001). Insofar as we have come to understand the origins and evolution of such contrasts, two theories predominate: tonogenesis (Haudricourt 1954) and registrogenesis (Huffman 1976). In their classical forms, tonogenesis and registrogenesis are well suited for modeling the development of tone and register in the best known, most studied languages of MSEA, but there is much additional complexity that they fail to capture. This is especially true for languages of Austroasiatic stock, which in many cases have developed tone and register in ways that must be considered ‘unorthodox’ with respect to the received models (Ferlus 1979, 2004, 2011; Diffloth 1982a, 1982b; Svantesson 1989; Gehrmann 2015; Sidwell 2015, 2019). The goal of this thesis is to present a possible way forward towards a unified conceptual framework for tone and register evolution in the languages of MSEA: desegmentalization. Expanding on Dockum’s (2019) concept of desegmental phonology, desegmentalization is the process by which one or more segmental properties (onset phonation, vowel height, vowel length or coda phonation) condition changes in the distribution of a language’s suprasegmental contrasts. A general survey of the Austroasiatic language family is presented, in which documented examples of desegmentalization are presented and discussed. Austroasiatic constitutes a useful laboratory for such a survey, because the identification of the segmental origins of suprasegmental contrasts in Austroasiatic languages is relatively straightforward in comparison to the other language families of MSEA. Based on this survey of desegmentalization processes in Austroasiatic, ten discrete desegmentalization models are proposed. The output typologies for the suprasegmental contrasts produced by each model are compared and implications for a general model of tonogenesis and registrogenesis are explored. This thesis offers (1) a digestible introduction for the non-specialist to the historical development of suprasegmental contrast in MSEA, (2) a resynthesis of current tonogenetic theory which integrates classical tonogenesis, classical registrogenesis and various other, lesser-known evolutionary pathways under the larger umbrella of desegmentalization and (3) a comprehensive overview of tone and register origins in the Austroasiatic family