Introduction

The goal of this article is to document data of nominalizing velar prefixes found in Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages of different branches spoken in Northeast India (NEI).

These data include and expand data sets on a Proto-Tibeto-Burman (PTB) “adjectival velar prefix” presented by Wolfenden (1929), Shafer (1966), Benedict (1972), and Matisoff (2003). This long-known velar prefix has been shown to occur on adjectival and stative verbs in different branches of Tibeto-Burman, and therefore was reconstructed with this function for PTB.

The additional evidence presented here reveals other functions of the “adjectival prefix” in most of the languages. Based on a growing body of literature on nominalization in TB, we know that these other functions are typically associated with nominalization, as is derivation of adjectives.

Specifically, the literature on nominalization in TB documents derivational functions on the one hand, i.e. deriving action/event and agent/patient nouns from verbs, and the derivation of adnominal modifiers as well as the marking of (verbal) citation forms. On the other hand, we find clausal nominalization typically associated with subordinate clauses (relative, complement, and, less commonly, adverbial clauses) as well as with particular main clause constructions (focus and emphatic constructions, questions, aspect marking, etc.) which sometimes get reanalyzed as new default constructions (see Bickel 1999, DeLancey 1989; 1994; in press, Genetti et al 2008, Noonan 1997, inter alia).

The phenomenon of Bodo-Garo

Bodo-Garo is a compact, low-level branch of Tibeto-Burman. That is to say, it includes a relatively small number of languages – perhaps a dozen, depending on how we define “language” – which are very similar to one another in their lexicon and grammatical structure. For a small, compact branch, it is spread over quite a large geographical area – and, before the expansion of Assamese and Bengali, certainly over an even larger one. Bodo-Garo languages are spread over a wider area than, say, Naga or Kiranti, each of which is considerably more linguistically diverse than Bodo-Garo. My purpose in this paper is to outline a proposal for the history of the Bodo-Garo branch of Tibeto-Burman which accounts for these facts, as a contribution to our understanding of Bodo-Garo as part of Tibeto-Burman and as a participant in the long-running story of intense language contact in the Brahmaputra Valley.

Briefly, I propose, following a suggestion of Burling (2007), that Proto-Bodo-Garo first emerged as a lingua franca used for communication across the various linguistic communities of the region, and that its striking simplicity and transparency reflect a period when it was widely spoken by communities for whom it was not a native language. In this paper I will first describe the relevant phenomena of Bodo-Garo and its Tibeto-Burman relatives. In §2 I will discuss how the facts of Bodo-Garo fit into various models of language change and differentiation. §3 will briefly review what can be said or imagined about the ethnolinguistic history of Assam and the Brahmaputra Valley. Finally, §4 will summarize my specific proposal for the origin of the Bodo-Garo branch.

Introduction

The North East of India is home to four language families: Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic and Tai. Barbora (2010), Konnerth (2011), Huziwara (2011) and Post (2011) have looked into the nominalization process in some Tibeto-Burman languages of the region, namely Mising and Karbi, spoken in Assam, Marma, spoken in Tripura and Bangladesh, and Galo, spoken in Arunachal Pradesh. Notable descriptions of nominalization in Tibeto-Burman languages of North East India are also found in grammars by Coupe (2007) and by van Breugel (2008). Accordingly, a study of nominalization in Assamese, an Indo-Aryan language of North East India, should provide information that would be of value to linguists with interest in the areal typology of the North East Indian region. The goal of this paper is to present such a study.

A brief overview of Assamese grammar

Assamese is a head-final language with a subject-object-verb word order. An agglutinative language, Assamese nominals are inflected for number, classifiers and case. The feminine gender marker -i suffixes to the classifier -zɔn. In finite clause constructions, a nominal argument in A function takes overt case marking. In S function, a nominal argument normally does not take an overt case marker. Pronominals, whether in S or in A function, do not take overt case marking. In the O position only, animate nominals optionally take an overt case marker. Arguments in peripheral positions take overt case markers. Finite verbs are inflected for tense, aspect and mood (TAM).

Introduction

This study is a descriptive account of the classifier system in Asamiya (Assamese), used as one of the most productive noun-encoding devices in the language. Asamiya shares many linguistic features with genetically related Indic languages, particularly with the Magadhan languages of Eastern India, but makes the most extensive and elaborate use of classifiers in terms of their scope and function. This phenomenon is generally ascribed to the influences and counter influences of the non-Aryan languages, particularly the neighbouring Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in and around Assam from the very early periods of its history (Kakati 2007: 278, 381–382; Goswami 1968; Emeneau 1956).

The study is concerned with various aspects of classifiers in Asamiya, as organised into different sections. §2 discusses the distribution of classifiers in the NP structure. §3 deals with the pragmatic, semantic and grammatical functions of classifiers. §4 attempts to subcategorize classifiers on the basis of their semantic considerations, followed by concluding remarks.

The classifiers in the examples are printed in bold and glossed as conglomerations of inherent semantic features without their grammatical or pragmatic information which are interspersed among the relevant texts, tables and/or free translations of examples. However, due to constraints of space, glossing in the Tables has been eschewed.

Introduction

The present chapter dicusses the grammar and meaning of classifiers in Assamese. In §2, we discuss classifier grammar, showing that the basic grammatical function of classifiers in Assamese is to unitize or individuate the noun to facilitate numerical quantification. They are thus numeral classifiers. In §3, we first identify the classifiers in Assamese, together with the semantic parameters they employ to categorize noun referents. The remainder of §3 then focuses on the meaning chains classifiers exhibit, showing how they extend their basic meaning in numerous ways so that they can categorize an open-ended class of noun referents which are apparently rather diverse and unrelated. The discussions in §2 and §3 are followed by our concluding remarks.

The grammatical functions of classifiers in Assamese

This section discusses the grammatical functions that classifiers in Assamese perform.

Classifiers and the object-mass distinction

A noun designates a kind of things, rather than an instance of the kind. Thus, for instance, the English word dog does not intrinsically refer to any particular dog; rather, it refers to a particular kind of animal. Now, in terms of ordinary human perception, kinds are of at least two types: a kind may refer either to a set of similar discrete objects, as with dog; or, it may refer to an unsegmented mass, as with water. In a language like English, the grammar is immediately sensitive to the distinction between these two types of kinds: the object-mass distinction.

We are very pleased to present the fourth volume of papers in the North East Indian Linguistics series. The papers in this volume were presented at the fourth NEILS conference, held at the North Eastern Hill University in Shillong, Meghalaya, from January 16–18, 2009, and organized by the Department of Linguistics, Gauhati University, in collaboration with scholars from the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University (Melbourne AU). All the papers in this volume have been peer-reviewed and then revised in close consultation with the editors. Final approval for the papers in this volume comes from the editorial staff of Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd. As in previous volumes our aim is to produce a volume reflective of both the linguistic diversity of the North East as well as the high quality of the current research.

The current volume is particularly representative of the diversity of the languages of the North East, the scholars working there, and the various research projects underway. Contributions range from renowned scholars of Tibeto-Burman linguistics to students from the North East making their first impact in the field of Linguistics. The articles in this volume cover four of the language families represented in North East India: Tai-Kadai, Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, and Austroasiatic and come from scholars based in the U.S., France, Germany, Japan, Norway, and Australia, but with the majority of contributions being from Indian scholars themselves.

When I first began research on Tibeto-Burman and Southeast Asian languages as a postgraduate student in 1975, North East India was a huge informational vacuum. Not that there was that much information to be had on Tibeto-Burman languages in general, but for the North East we had only the tantalizing snippets of the Linguistic Survey of India and a handful of colonial-era jottings. Of course, many years earlier the publication of the <I>LSI made North East India better documented linguistically than many other corners of the earth, and made early comparative work on Tibeto-Burman possible. But time moves on, and while the fragmentary and primitive documentation provided by the LSI and the efforts of enthusiastic but untrained missionaries and authors fueled the pioneering work of Konow and others, by the time I entered the field there was little more that could be done with the superficial documentation available. And this seemed likely to be the situation for the foreseeable future, since the region was generally inaccessible to outsiders at the time, and almost nothing was being done locally. For those of us outside India the valiant efforts of intrepid Indian linguists like K. Das Gupta and I. M. Simon gave us only tantalizing glimpses of the linguistic riches that someday might be available to the world of linguistics.

The stage of the language known as “Middle Korean” lasted from the tenth century until the end of the sixteenth century. It began with the establishment of the Koryŏ dynasty in AD 918, when the new government moved the capital from Kyŏngju, in the southeast, to Kaegyŏng (later to be renamed Kaesŏng) in the middle of the peninsula. It nominally ended when the Japanese invaded Korea in 1592, and the resulting chaos disrupted the written record of the language.

Middle Korean can be most conveniently divided into two parts: Early Middle Korean and Late Middle Korean. The language of the Koryŏ period (918~1392) is considered to be Early Middle Korean, while the language of the first two hundred years of the Chosŏn period is taken to be Late Middle Korean. That division is not made to mark sweeping changes in the language. On the contrary, political and social developments point more toward linguistic stability than significant change between the Koryŏ and the Chosŏn. At the end of the Koryŏ, in 1392, the founders of the new, Chosŏn dynasty chose a place not very far away to build their capital. Unlike the move from Kyŏngju to Kaesŏng, the move from Kaesŏng to Seoul (then called Hanyang) took place over a relatively short distance and is usually thought to have had a minimal effect on the language. The regional base of the language did not change.

Where does the Korean language come from? This origin question is of ultimate interest to linguists, but it has also captured the imagination of the Korean lay public, who have tended to conflate the question with broader ones about their own ethnic origin. Linguistic nomenclature has added to the confusion. When specialists speak to the public about “family trees” and “related languages,” the non-specialist naturally thinks that the Korean language has relatives and a biological family like those people do. And when a people as homogeneous as Koreans are told that their language belongs to a family that includes Mongolian and Manchu, they envision their ancestors arriving in the cul-de-sac of the Korean peninsula as horse-riding warriors. It becomes a personal kind of romance.

In this way, linguistic theories presented in a simplistic way tend to overshadow complex ethnographic and archeological issues. But the linguistic question is no less complex, all the more so because, unlike archeological evidence, linguistic evidence cannot be dug from the ground. Artifacts have been extracted from the Korean earth that speak to the structure of earlier societies and cultures, but there is nothing of comparable age to be found in records of the language. To explore the history of the language at that time depth, far beyond what has been actually written down, linguists can only rely upon the comparison of Korean with other languages and hope to find one that has sprung from the same “original” source.

The story of Korean begins with the invention of the Korean alphabet. Ever since it was introduced in 1446, the Korean alphabet has been the source of precise and detailed information about the phonological and morphological structure of the language. In that year, some three years after an announcement of its creation had been made in the dynastic annals, the reigning monarch, King Sejong, promulgated a handbook introducing the new script and explaining its use, and from that point on Korean has been a language structurally accessible to future generations of linguists. Before the alphabet, there is virtually nothing in the way of quality documentation; with the alphabet, Korean structure is laid out for us to see. (The invention, how it happened, and what we know as a result, will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5.) Thus, lucid and precise written records of the Korean language go back slightly more than five and a half centuries.

That length of time may seem ancient by most standards, but it is not particularly long on the time scale of East Asian history, or even of Korean history. Chinese writing is thought to have begun around the seventeenth century BC; and it was certainly a fully developed writing system by the fourteenth century BC. That means histories were being written and literature composed almost two thousand years before the Korean alphabet was invented. That was of course in China.