TY  - JOUR
A1  - LaPolla, Randy J.
T1  - Verb agreement, head-marking vs. dependent-marking, and the "deconstruction" of Tibeto-Burman morpho-syntax
T2  - Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society
N2  - Since the mid-1970's, the question of whether or not a verb agreement system1 (VAS) should be reconstructed for Proto-Tibeto-Bunnan (PTB) has been a controversial topic, but because of the large amount of work published arguing in favor of reconstructing a VAS for PTB, especially by James J. Bauman (1974, 1975a, 1975b, 1979) and Scott DeLancey (1980, 1983, 1988, 1989, to appear), many people have begun to accept the existence of a VAS in PTB as received knowledge. In a recent paper on verb agreement systems in Tibeto-Burman, Scott DeLancey states that 'There can no longer be any serious doubt that a system of verb agreement must be attributed to Proto-Tibeto-Bunnan (PTB)' (DeLancey 1988: 1). Though the number of papers supporting this position is quite large, I would like to raise several serious doubts about the theoretical and methodological basis for reconstructing a VAS for PTB' and at the same time argue for the use of functionally and typologically based theories of grammar, as exemplified by the head-marking/dependent-marking distinction developed in Nichols 1986, in diachronic syntax and syntactic reconstruction.
KW  - Morphosyntax
KW  - Proto-Tibetobirmanisch
Y1  - 2015
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/37848
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-378481
SN  - 0363-2946
VL  - 15
SP  - 356
EP  - 366
PB  - Soc. [u.a.]
CY  - Berkeley, Calif.
ER  -