Schedule StuTS 65

Kulung is a soon-to-be endangered language spoken by around 15,000 people in eastern Nepal, and belongs to the Kiranti branch of the Tibeto-Burman language family. Kiranti languages famously stand out among the mostly isolating Tibeto-Burman languages for having an exceptionnally complex verb morphology, which is believed to be an inherited feature, hence their immense interest for Tibeto-Burman historical linguistics. In a similar fashion to all Kiranti languages, the Kulung verb agrees with both Agent and Patient, distinguishes dual vs. plural, makes a further distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person non-singular, and is made up of a string of polyfunctional affixes appended to a stem that displays a rich variety of forms throughout the paradigm. A single verb may have up to eight alternating stems, which cannot be deduced from the shape of the first suffix appended to them. As such, said allomorphy escapes any attempt to simply describe it as a phonologically conditionned phenomenon on the sole basis of synchronical data. Therefore, this work aims at reconstructing pre-Kulung verb roots, on the basis of both internal (i.e. Kulung) and external data (i.e. cognate verbs from other Kiranti languages), and thence figuring out the processes through which the profuse forms attested in contemporary Kulung can be derived from the reconstructed roots.

Info

Day: 2019-05-25
Start time: 15:30
Duration: 00:30
Room: 100 / Hörsaal XVIIb
Track: Historical linguistics
Language: en

Links:

• iCalendar

Files

• Verb stem allomorphy in Kulung

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