Introduction

Kudeng War is a dialect of Nongtalang-Nongbareh War, one of the three sub-groups of War, itself a nearly unknown, unwritten conservative Mon- Khmer (MK) language. War is spoken by approximately 65,000 speakers mostly in Meghalaya, North-eastern India. Wars are mostly betel nuts planters on slopes and small isolated groups remain in Bangladesh, in Assam and between Mizoram and Tripura states on the former space of an important pre-colonial Pnar kingdom. War belongs to a group comprising Pnar, Khasi, Lyngngam (PWKL) and many “composite varieties”. An overview with two linguistic maps of PWKL and War and also a glossed sample text in War can be found in Daladier (this volume).

War serial verb constructions (SVCs) share common features with SE Asian SVCs, like adversative constructions and serial lexicalization as a complementation strategy. They also exhibit features not yet described which might be shared by other Austroasiatic languages. War SVCs include values expressed differently in a language like English, in active and in passive verbal auxiliations and also in “light verb” constructions; they also include values expressed in English clausal dependencies without realis/ irrealis, finite/non finite or past participial/gerund morphology.

In addition to these values, grammaticalized in their own way, grammaticalized SVCs in War express productively values not grammaticalized in English. They express especially a gradience of active and passive values associated with subjectivity values referring to the speaker (or his subject).