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This paper discusses the use of comparative data when describing a particular language. That is, even tho ugh we might be describing one variety, we can gain insights into the development of that variety from comparisons with related varieties. The examples presented are from the Rawang and Dulong languages. two closely related Tibeto-Burman languages in Myanmar and China respectively. We see that comparison with Dulong data can help us to understand the development of the applicative benefactive in Rawang. and comparison with Rawang can help us understand the development of the verbal first-person plural long vowels and nominal agentive marking long vowels in Dulong.
Rawang [...] is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by people who live in the far north of Kachin State in Myanmar (Burma), particularly along the Mae Hka ('Nmai Hka) and Maeli Hka (Mali Hka) river valleys (see map on back page); population unknown, although Ethnologue gives 100,000. In the past they had been called ‘Nung’, or (mistakenly) ‘Hkanung’, and are considered to be a sub-group of the Kachin by the Myanmar government. Until government policies put a stop to the clearing of new land in 1994, the Rawang speakers still practiced slash and burn farming on the mountainsides (they still do a bit, but only on already claimed land), in conjunction with planting paddy rice near the river. They are closely related to people on the other side of the Chinese border in Yunnan classified as either Dulong or Nu(ng) (see LaPolla 2001, 2003 on the Dulong language). In this paper, I will be discussing the word-class-changing constructions found in Rawang, using data of the Mvtwang (Mvt River) dialect of Rawang, which is considered the most central of those dialects in Myanmar and so has become something of a standard for writing and inter-group communication.
Two problems cloud our understanding of subgrouping in Tibeto-Burman. One is the lack of consistent and clear standards and principles for subgrouping. Subgrouping is often based on certain features that the languages are said to share, or on a few shared lexical items, or even on the fieldworker's intuitions, or on how remote speakers feel different languages are (the degree of mutual intelligibility).
This paper discusses the types of relative clause and noun complement structures found in the Rawang language, a Tibeto-Burman language of northern Myanmar, as well as their origin and uses, with data taken mainly from naturally occurring texts. Two types are preposed relative clauses, but in one the relative clause is nominalized, and in the other it is not. The non-nominalized form with a general head led to the development of nominalizing suffixes and one type of nominalized relative clause structure. As the nominalized form is a nominal itself, it can be postposed to the head in an appositional structure. There is also discussion of the Rawang structures in the context of Tibeto-Burman and the development of relative clause structures in the language family.
Questions on transitivity
(2008)
This handout (it isn’t a paper) presents phenomena and questions, rather than conclusions, related to the concept of transitivity. The idea is to return to these questions at the end of the Workshop to see if we can have a clearer consensus about the best general analysis of phenomena associated with transitivity. Section 2 presents alternative analyses of transitivity and questions about transitivity in three languages I have worked on. Section 3 discusses a few of the different conceptualisations of transitivity that might be relevant to our thinking about the questions related to these languages or that bring up further questions. Section 4 presents some general questions that might be asked of individual languages.
In chapters seven and eight of his book Language, Sapir talked about what he called ‘drift’, the changes that a language undergoes through time [...]. Dialects of a language are formed when that language is broken into different segments that no longer move along the same exact drift. Even so, the general drift of a language has its deep and its shallow currents; those features that distinguish closely related dialects will be of the rapid, shallow currents, while the deeper, slower currents may remain consistent between the dialects for millennia. It is this latter type that Sapir felt is ‘fundamental to the genius of the language’ (p. 172), and he said that ‘The momentum of the more fundamental, the pre-dialectal, drift is often such that languages long disconnected will pass through the same or strikingly similar phases’ (p. 172).
In terms of the direction of development, I referred to Johanna Nichols' work on head-marking vs. dependant marking. Nichols did not make reference to any languages in Tibeto-Burman, but all of the Tibeto-Burman languages that do not have verb agreement systems are solidly dependent-marking (i.e., they have marking on the nouns for case or pragmatic function); those languages with verb agreement systems, a type of head marking, also have many dependent-marking features (of the same types as the non-pronominalized languages). The question, then, is which is older, the dependent-marking type or the headmarking (actually mixed) type?
In attempting to reconstruct the morphosyntax of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, one of the most basic questions to be answered is what was the unmarked word order of the proto-language? Chinese, Bai, and Karen are verb-medial languages, while all of the Tibeto-Burman languages except for Bai and Karen have verb-final word order. lf these languages are all related, as we can assume from lexical correspondences, then either Chinese, Bai and Karen changed from verb-final to verb-medial word order, or the other Tibeto-Burman languages changed trom verb-medial to verb-final order. How we answer the question of which languages changed their word would then give us the answer to the question of word order in Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
For this paper, 170 Tibeto-Burman languages were surveyed for nominal ease marking (adpositions), in an attempt to determine ifit would be possible to reeonstruet any ease markers to Proto· Tibeto-Burman, and in so doing leam more about the nature of the grammatieal organization of Proto-Tibeto-Burman. The data were also eross-cheeked for patterns of isomorphy/polysemy, to see ifwe can leam anything about the development ofthe forms we da find in the languages. The results of the survey indicate that although a11 Tibeto-Bunnan languages have developed some sort of relation marking, none of the markers ean be reconstrueted to the oldest stage of the family. Looking at the patterns of isomorphy or polysemy, we find there are regularities to the patterns we find, and on the basis of these regularities we can make assurne that the path of development most probably followed the markedness/prototypicality clines: the locative and ablative use would have arose first and then were extended to the more abstract cases.
Nominalization in Rawang
(2009)