Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area - Volume 49, Issue 1, 2026

This paper investigates the occurrence of ABB modifier patterns in Wolam Ngio (Glottolog: wola1254), a North Khiamniungan variety, along with the closely related standard Thang variety which serves as the standard dialect in India, as well as Kingphu Ngio spoken in neighbouring Myanmar. North Khiamniungan shows the ABB pattern as one of many productive uses of reduplication. This paper builds upon previous work on the occurrence of reduplicated modifiers in languages of Northeast India in which the bare stem A is followed by an often reduplicated morpheme B~B, which may or may not be semantically transparent.

This paper describes systems of direction and associated motion in Barpak Ghale, a Tamangic language spoken in Nepal. The language has two sets of suffixes to encode these grammatical categories. The first set, -pʌ and -rʌ, encodes direction and prior associated motion, while the second set, -kɰi and -ri, encodes direction and subsequent or concurrent associated motion. The co-expression of direction and associated motion raises the question of how one reading is selected over the other. Examining data from the present author’s fieldwork, this study argues that the interpretation of these suffixes depends on the semantic class of the verb root. The data generally follow the hierarchy of verb classes as proposed in typological studies. In addition, this study demonstrates that causative-motion verbs exhibit distinct behaviors depending on their subtypes. It argues that the nature of causation and the accompaniment of the causer in causative-motion verbs play a crucial role in the interpretation of suffixes.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive description of the forms and distribution of negation expressions in southern Tujia (Tibeto-Burman), an endangered language spoken in southern China, from a diachronic perspective and comparing the negation forms with those in northern Tujia. Southern Tujia employs different negators, some of which are disappearing, while some new ones are being introduced. Furthermore, negation is sometimes preverbal, sometimes postverbal. We analyze this complex situation from a historical perspective, in which some aspects can be explained as continuations from Proto-Tibeto-Burman, and others as innovations, based on grammaticalization, semantic adaptation and borrowing, which have led to the present complex state of affairs. These kinds of changes can be compared to developments in other languages in the world, and therefore contribute to typological research on the expression and diachronic development of negation.

This article presents a transcribed, glossed, and translated folktale in Thebo Tibetan. The narrative is presented in four-line interlinear format with accompanying commentary and time-aligned transcription. This is the first published text in Thebo Tibetan and offers valuable insight into its structure and oral narrative tradition. This contribution enhances the documentation of Thebo and expands the comparative folklore record for Tibeto-Burman languages.

This preliminary study argues that the Lhasa Tibetan (LT) Factive evidential category is fundamentally polysemous. Aside from capturing the category’s full semantic range, a polysemous account of Factive also resolves apparent contradictions in prior descriptions and better predicts its distribution in discourse and narration. Drawing on elicited scenarios and consultant judgments, I show that the uses of Factive constructions cluster into three related but distinct functions — familiar knowledge, common knowledge, and logical inference — which vary along two dimensions: (i) whether a specific perceptual act is construed and (ii) how knowledge is distributed between interlocutors. These dimensions yield predictable, context-specific effects on the tense-aspect and discourse-pragmatic interpretations of a sentence indicating systematic polysemy, rather than semantic vagueness (Geeraerts 1993: 223–272). Diachronically, LT Factive forms derive from two constructions, *red and *yod.pa.red (Shao 2016). Although both contain the element *red, they entered the Sentence Ending paradigm (the morphosyntactic paradigm that encodes epistemic-evidential contrasts) with distinct connotations which were later aligned as a single category. This Factive category serves as an effective strategy for negotiating interlocutors’ “territories of information” (Kamio 1994, 1997): speakers use Factive to signal contextually varying values of knowledge ownership, epistemic proximity and perceived reliability. Consequently, the category’s polysemy has the paradigmatic effect of increasing the number of available epistemic-evidential contrasts, giving the Sentence Ending paradigm greater expressive reach.