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Article published In:
Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area
Vol. 41:1 (2018) ► pp.75–105

Transitivity markers in West Himalayish

Synchronic and diachronic considerations

| University of Zurich

The present paper describes a transitivity distinction that is attested in some Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages of the West Himalayish (WH) subgroup. The relevant distinction is encoded by a set of dedicated markers that occur between verb stems and inflectional endings and group verbs into transitivity classes. The paper first offers a synchronic description of transitivity classes in the WH language Bunan, discussing their formal realization and functional motivation. Subsequently, the relevant transitivity classes are discussed from a historical-comparative perspective. It is argued that the transitivity distinction developed when an object agreement marker was reanalyzed as a marker of transitive verbs. The paper thus offers new perspectives on transitivity in TB from both a synchronic and a diacronic point of view, and adduces evidence for a hitherto underscribed reanalysis from “object agreement marker” > “marker of transitive verbs”.

Keywords: Tibeto-Burman, historical linguistics, transitivity, object agreement, reanalysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Preliminaries
    • 2.1Transitivity as a verbal category
    • 2.2The WH languages
  • 3.Transitivity classes in Bunan
    • 3.1The morphological structure of the Bunan verb
    • 3.2The three transitivity classes of Bunan
      • 3.2.1The morphological alternations
      • 3.2.2Functional motivation
  • 4.Diachronic perspective
    • 4.1Transitivity classes in eastern WH languages
      • 4.1.1The intransitive and transitive classes
      • 4.1.2The middle class
      • 4.1.3The pervasiveness of the transitivity distinctions
      • 4.1.4The diachronic origins of the transitivity classes
    • 4.2Transitivity classes beyond eastern WH
      • 4.2.1Evidence for transitivity classes in western WH
      • 4.2.2Evidence for transitivity classes outside of WH
    • 4.3A possible source of the transitivity markers
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 20 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ltba.17011.wid
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