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Tangut verb agreement
Optional or not?
- Source: Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, Volume 45, Issue 1, Jun 2022, p. 93 - 109
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- 11 Feb 2021
- 16 Jun 2021
- 02 Jun 2022
Abstract
Abstract
The Tangut language is of particular importance to the field of SinoTibetan Studies, notably because of its morphological conservatism, which is unexpectedly correlated with a simplification of its syllable structure, a consequence of a process Miyake (2012) called “compression”. Such conservatism is evident in the syllable qualities reconstructed, which sometimes reflect proto Tangut’s ancient derivational processes. Verbs also exhibit various flectional phenomena, mainly due to conversion of agreement rules and referential hierarchy rules (Silverstein 1976), in a manner reminiscent of the indexation system of languages of the rGyalrongic taxon within the Qiangic family. The present paper attempts to explain the absence of indexation in the Tangut verb, a key phenomenon in the history of verb agreement analysis. First, I recall the main rules of the Tangut verb’s agreement system, as shown by Kepping (1975) and Gong (2001). Second, cases of nonagreement are analyzed. Apart from the case of nonlocal contexts, we see that the absence of agreement occurs in nonfinite forms resulting from a dependency pattern, such as clause chaining, topic/comment context, and semantically dependent modality.1