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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton May 6, 2016

Tangut, Gyalrongic, Kiranti and the nature of person indexation in Sino-Tibetan/Trans-Himalayan

  • Guillaume Jacques EMAIL logo
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard

Abstract

The diachronic analysis of person indexation systems in Sino-Tibetan (Trans-Himalayan) languages is currently a topical issue. Factual errors have occasionally crept in, detracting somewhat from the quality of the linguistic discussion about these systems. Evidence from Tangut, Gyalrongic and Kiranti is so central to the debates that it appeared useful to provide a few clarifications about their person indexation systems, adducing evidence from a body of texts that has been considerably enriched in the past decade. The main points made in this paper can be summarized as follows. First, the view that personal affixes derive diachronically from pronouns is by no means as self-evident as it may seem. Second, person indexation in Tangut, the oldest Trans-Himalayan language with person indexation, is not optional, as has sometimes been stated in the literature. Third, person indexation in Gyalrongic and Kiranti is sensitive to grammatical relations, a finding which calls into question its analysis as marking speech act participant involvement.

Funding statement: Funding: This research was funded by the HimalCo project (ANR-12-CORP-0006) and is related to the research strand LR-4.11 ‘‘Automatic Paradigm Generation and Language Description’’ of the Labex EFL (funded by the ANR/CGI). Glosses follow the Leipzig glosses rules, to which the following are added: antierg antiergative, dir direct, hon honorific, irr irrealis, inv inverse, pot potentialis, sens sensory.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Scott DeLancey, Stephen Dodson, Nathan Hill, Boyd Michailovsky, Alexis Michaud, Jackson T.S. Sun and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments on previous versions of this paper. I am responsible for any error that remain in this work. The Japhug examples are taken from a corpus that is progressively being made available in the Pangloss Collection (Michailovsky et al. 2014).

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Supplemental Material

The online version of this article (DOI: 10.1515/LINGVAN-2015-0033) offers supplementary material, available to authorized users.


Received: 2015-11-16
Accepted: 2016-2-12
Published Online: 2016-5-6
Published in Print: 2016-12-1

© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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