Junctural and Parasitic Voicing in Burmese

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Phonetic Sources of Phonological Patterns: Synchronic and Diachronic Explanations (2003

Apical and Laminal Articulations in Hakha Lai

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Tone and Syllable Structure in Hakha-Lai

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

The Duhumbi Perspective On Proto-Western Kho-Bwa Onsets.

The eight Western Kho-Bwa varieties are spoken in western Arunachal Pradesh in Northeast India and form a small, coherent sub-group of the Tibeto-Burman (Trans-Himalayan / Sino-Tibetan) language family.This paper presents 96 sound correspondences, mainly between the two Western Kho-Bwa varieties Duhumbi and Khoitam, with additional evidence from other Western Kho-Bwa varieties and other Tibeto-Burman languages whenever deemed illustrative. On basis of these sound correspondences, I propose 282 Western Kho-Bwa proto-forms including a total of 92 onsets. The less common reconstructed Western Kho-Bwa onsets are the uvular onsets and the voiceless nasal and approximant onsets.A unique innovation of the Western Kho-Bwa languages, and indeed the Kho-Bwa languages in general, is the correspondence of initial *s- in other Tibeto-Burman languages to a vocal onset in Proto-Western Kho-Bwa and its descendent varieties. Another relatively unique innovation is the correspondence between Western Kho-Bwa obstruent onsets *b- and *g- ~ *kʰ- ~ *k- and other Tibeto-Burman nasal onsets *m- and *ŋ-, respectively

Three types of causative constructions in Hakha Lai

Hakha Lai (Chin) belongs to the Kuki-Chin branch of the Tibeto-Burman family. It is spoken in Hakha and Thantlang towns, and their vicinity (Chin State). Lai has predominantly SOV order.Published versio

Directional Pre-verbal Particles in Hakha Lai

Hakha Lai is mainly spoken in Hakha and Thantlang areas, and their  vicinities in Chin State, Myanmar (formerly known as Burma).  It is also spoken in the adjacent areas of India and Bangladesh. Lai speakers are about 100,000 people. Lai is also used extensively as a second language by speakers of other Chin languages in the Chin Hills.The data in H. Lai are transcribed in both standard orthography as well as a phonemic orthography developed and used when the first author was a consultant for a two-semesters long field method class (Fall 1997 – Spring 1998) conducted by Prof. James A. Matisoff at UC Berkeley. H. Lai has five pairs of directional pre-verbal particles which describe the “where” of the participants and the “how” of the actions involved. This paper analyzes these deictic phenomena in terms of how the interlocutors behave in relation to position, distance, and movement, their diachronic origins, and their other functions

The syntax of psycho-collocations in Hakha Lai

This paper investigates the unique property of the syntax of psycho-collocations in Lai which allows an ambitransitivity analyzed as a kind of grammaticalization. The author claims that this syntactic phenomenon is possible because the syntax is constructed around the possessor of the psycho-nouns who remains the psychological reference regardless of whether the stimulus is expressed by a subject or an object clitic.Published versio