The history of postverbal agreement in Kuki-Chin

In the Kuki-Chin branch of Tibeto-Burman we find both a widespread prefixal verb agreement paradigm and, in many languages, a distinct, competing postverbal agreement system. It is clear, and generally acknowledged, that the prefixal system is a KC innovation, while the postverbal system traces back to Proto-Tibeto-Burman. This paper assembles the evidence for the postverbal paradigm from the conservative Northern Chin, Old Kuki, and Southern Chin subbranches, and makes some suggestions toward a preliminary reconstruction of the paradigm in Proto-Kuki-Chin. The older paradigm has been lost in the Central Chin (e.g. Mizo) and Mara languages, but the older 2nd person index has been incorporated into the modern paradigmsAustralian National Universit

Lexical Comparisons between Proto-Kuki-Chin and Jinghpaw: Evidence for a Central Branch of Trans Himalayan

This paper presents a set of lexical correspondences between Jinghpaw and Proto-Kuki-Chin as reconstructed by VanBik (2009) which have no attested comparanda outside the hypothesized Central branch of Trans-Himalayan/Sino-Tibetan suggested by Bradley (1997) and DeLancey (2021). Jinghpaw and South Central/Kuki-Chin represent two hypothesized groupings, Sal and Kuki-Naga, which are the major constituents of this proposed branch, so these comparisons are adduced as potential evidence for the Central hypothesis. Included in these lexical comparisons is a substantial number of sets where there are Jinghpaw comparanda for one or the other, or both, of the alternating verbal stems reconstructed for PKC. It is argued that these represent particularly strong evidence for a special genealogical connection between the languages

Event Construal and Case Role Assignment

Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Grammar of Event Structure (1991), pp. 338-35

Sociolinguistic typology in North East India: A tale of two branches

Long-standing ideas about the "linguistic cycle" hold that languages naturally shift from analytic to synthetic morphological patterns and then from synthetic back to analytic in a long-term cyclic pattern. But the demonstrable history of actual languages shows dramatic differences in their tendencies to shift in either direction, and there are well-known examples of language families which preserve complexity or analyticity over millennia. We see the same thing within Tibeto-Burman, where some branches are highly synthetic and others analytic. Examining the history of a representative language from each of two TB branches in Northeast India, analytic Boro (Boro-Garo) and synthetic Lai (Kuki-Chin), suggests a possible sociolinguistic explanation for these tendencies. Trudgill and others have suggested that the tendency to develop and maintain strongly analytic grammatical patterns is associated with "exoteric" languages spoken by large populations, and regularly used to communicate with outsiders, while the development and maintenance of morphological complexity is characteristic of "esoteric" languages spoken by small communities and used only to communicate with other native speakers. This paper presents Boro-Garo and Kuki-Chin as exemplifying these tendencies

Lhasa Tibetan Evidentials and the Semantics of Causation

Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1985), pp. 65-7

Agentivity and Causation: Data from Newari

Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1983), pp. 54-6

The History of Postverbal Agreement in Kuki-Chin.

Abstract In the Kuki-Chin branch of Tibeto-Burman we find both a widespread prefixal verb agreement paradigm and, in many languages, a distinct, competing postverbal agreement system. It is clear, and generally acknowledged, that the prefixal system is a KC innovation, while the postverbal system traces back to Proto-Tibeto-Burman. This paper assembles the evidence for the postverbal paradigm from the conservative Northern Chin, Old Kuki, and Southern Chin subbranches, and makes some suggestions toward a preliminary reconstruction of the paradigm in Proto-Kuki-Chin. The older paradigm has been lost in the Central Chin (e.g. Mizo) and Mara languages, but the older 2 nd person index has been incorporated into the modern paradigms

Transitivity and Ergative Case in Lhasa Tibetan

Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1984), pp. 131-14

Relativization and Nominalization in Bodic

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Tibeto-Burman and Southeast Asian Linguistics (2002

The Bipartite Stem Belt: Disentangling Areal and Genetic Correspondences

Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Historical Issues in Native American Languages (1996