Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area - Current Issue

This paper deals with the synchronic and historical phonology of Gzitsha, a Tibetic language spoken in Jiuzhaigou county (Sichuan, China). It shows that the evolution of the onsets, the rhymes and the tonogenesis, all present unique commonalities with Baima, providing definite evidence that Gzitsha and Baima constitute a clade within the Tibetic subgroup of Sino-Tibetan.

A substantial minority of Tibeto-Burman languages have, in addition to independent pronouns, a set of pronominal proclitics. These function as possessives, as elements in compositional pronominal forms, and sometimes as oblique stems. In some languages these are easily interpreted as phonologically reduced forms of the independent pronouns, but there is ample evidence to allow us to reconstruct singular forms *aŋ ‘1sg’ and *na ‘2sg’ to the proto-language. Since *aŋ is not easily interpreted as simply an unstressed form of *ŋa, the PTB 1sg independent pronoun, we interpret this as evidence for the PTB provenance of the proclitic paradigm. Divergent paradigms in the daughter languages reflect re-interpretation of originally non-singular 1st person forms as singulars. Secondary rearrangements and widespread loss of the original proclitic paradigm may have been influenced by the resemblance between *1sg aŋ and the well-known PTB 3rd person pronominal prefix *ʔa(ŋ).

This paper provides a comprehensive description of differential object marking (DOM) in Bodo [bɔɾɔ] (ISO 639–3: brx), a Bodo-Koch language of the Tibeto-Burman language group, spoken largely in the Bodoland Territorial Region (BTR) of Assam, India. Some object NPs in Bodo are obligatorily case marked, while others are variably case marked. Object marking can be associated with various referential and discourse properties of the object NPs, such as definiteness, specificity, human reference, newsworthiness, topicality, contrast, and so on, depending on the class of object NPs or the construction in which they occur. This paper argues that DOM in Bodo encodes discourse prominence and the various referential and discourse properties are the prominence-lending cues which boost the discourse prominence of the object referents. Speakers often use DOM to dynamically signal the prominence status of discourse participants based on their communicative goal.

The article revisits the causative voicing alternation attested in a restricted number of fossilised lexical pairs in various sub-branches of the Trans-Himalayan language family. I introduce linguistic facts from the Tibetic languages which have not been previously investigated and point to shortcomings in arguments previously put forward. With new data from Old Literary Tibetan, the article lends support to the devoicing hypothesis according to which causative verbs with voiceless root consonants were derived from a-causative voiced verbs through the prefix *s‑: *s+√Gacaus > √Kcaus. By ordering linguistic facts about Tibetic historical morphology, the article demonstrates the existence of several processes of causative derivation that can be aligned chronologically, thereby helping to resolve some of the burning problems in Trans-Himalayan verb morphology. Consequently, two distinct derivational patterns are reconstructed to Proto-Trans-Himalayan: I. acaus √G‑ > caus √K‑, and II. caus *s‑ ⪤ acaus *ᴺ‑, revealing two causative prefixes, *s1‑ and *s2‑.

While most of the Horpic languages have a genitive marker with a j- initial, the genitive marker in Nyagrong Minyag seems to correspond to the ergative marker in the other Horpic languages, which suggests the change from ergative to genitive in Nyagrong Minyag. This article analyzes the semantic shift of this genitive marker in Nyagrong Minyag from a diachronic point of view, along with synchronic analyses and typological evidence.

This paper shows a structured functional split for the Mùwe Ké la-don (-‍na, -‍la, -‍ru/du), which previous work grouped under the umbrella term ‘Locative’. Drawing primarily on fifteen texts from elder speakers and authorities on the language, the study examines governing verb type, the nature of marked NPs, the resulting semantic case, and the presence of a definitive endpoint to motion to reveal five distinct case functions. Locative -‍na marks static location, allative -‍la a goal of motion without endpoint, and terminative -‍ru/du a goal of motion with endpoint. Additionally -‍ru/du marks locations of action with non-motion lexical verbs while -‍la retains its known dative function. The markers’ connective and temporal functions are also illustrated, demonstrating strong links to these primary case functions. This delineation replaces the idea of free variants with a structured system that provides a stable foundation for future research on Mùwe Ké morphosyntax.