Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T19:52:18.841Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Stem alternations in Kiranti and their implications for the morphology–phonology interface

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2020

BORJA HERCE Open the ORCID record for BORJA HERCE [Opens in a new window]
BORJA HERCE*
Affiliation:
Author’s address: University of Zurich, Plattenstrasse 54, 8032Zürich, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Stem alternation is present in the verbal inflection of all documented Kiranti languages, where it ranges from the straightforward phonologically conditioned (e.g. Athpariya and Chintang) to the purely morphological and baroque (e.g. Khaling and Dumi). This paper surveys stem alternation patterns across the whole family. Its main finding is that, unlike the morphological stem alternations of West Kiranti, the phonologically-conditioned stem alternations of East Kiranti are characterized by a very striking distributional similarity (often identity) across languages, even in the presence of quite drastic affixal changes. This and other findings suggest that these stem alternation patterns should be regarded as a (morphomic) grammatical phenomenon of its own right, despite being derivable from the forms of suffixes. Furthermore, comparison with West Kiranti suggests that this coextensiveness with a coherent phonological environment actually enhances some typically morphomic traits such as diachronic resilience and productivity.

Keywords

diachronyKirantimorphomesparadigmphonological conditioningstem alternation
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 321 - 363
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Thanks are due to three anonymous referees of the Journal of Linguistics and to JL editor Marc van Oostendorp for feedback that has helped to improve this paper. Earlier versions of it were presented at the Workshop on Non-canonicity in Inflection at the University of Surrey, and at the 13th Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology at the University of Pavia. I thank the audiences of those events for various comments and suggestions, particularly Matthew Baerman, Balthasar Bickel, and Erich Round. The financial support of the Basque Government scholarship PRE_2015_1_0175 and of TECHNE are also gratefully acknowledged.

Abbreviations in this paper follow the Leipzig Glossing Rules.

References

REFERENCES

Allen, Nicholas Justin. 1975. Sketch of Thulung grammar: With three texts and a glossary. Ithaca, NY: China–Japan Program, Cornell University.Google Scholar
Anderson, Stephen R. 2008. Phonologically conditioned allomorphy in the morphology of Surmiran (Rumantsch). Word Structure 1.2, 109–134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Stephen R. 2011. Stress-conditioned allomorphy in Surmiran (Rumantsch). In Goldbach, Maria, Hinzelin, Marc-Olivier, Maiden, Martin & Smith, John Charles (eds), Morphological autonomy: Perspectives from Romance inflectional morphology, 13–35. Oxford: Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar
Aronoff, Mark. 1994. Morphology by itself: Stems and inflectional classes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Aronoff, Mark. 2016. Competition and the lexicon. In Iacobini, Claudio, Elia, Annibale & Voghera, Miriam (eds.), Livelli di analisi e fenomeni di interfaccia. Atti del XLVII congresso internazionale della Società di Linguistica Italiana [Levels of anlisis and interface phenomena: Proceedings of the XLVII International Congress of the Linguistic Society of Italy], 39–52. Roma: Bulzoni.Google Scholar
Baerman, Matthew & Corbett, Greville G.. 2012. Stem alternations and multiple exponence. Word Structure 5.1, 52–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bickel, Balthasar & Gaenszle, Martin. 2015. First person objects, antipassives, and the political history of the Southern Kirant. Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 2, 63–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bickel, Balthasar & Nichols, Johanna. 2007. Inflectional morphology. In Shopen, Timothy (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, vol. 3.2, 169–240. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blevins, James P. 2006. Word-based morphology. Journal of Linguistics 42.3, 531–573.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borchers, Dörte. 2008. A grammar of Sunwar: Descriptive grammar, paradigms, texts and glossary. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Bye, Patrik & Svenonius, Peter. 2012. Non-concatenative morphology as epiphenomenon. In Trommer, Jochen (ed.), The morphology and phonology of exponence, 427–495. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diessel, Holger. 2019. The grammar network. Cambridge: Cambridge University PressCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doornenbal, Marius. 2009. A grammar of Bantawa. Ph.D. dissertation, Leiden University.Google Scholar
Ebert, Karen H. 1997a. A grammar of Athpare. Munich: Lincom Europa.Google Scholar
Ebert, Karen H. 1997b. Camling:(Chamling). Munich: Lincom Europa.Google Scholar
Ebert, Karen. 2003. Kiranti languages: An overview. In Thurgood, Graham & LaPolla, Randy J. (eds.), The Sino-Tibetan languages, 505–517. London: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Enger, Hans-Olav. 2014. Reinforcement in inflection classes: Two cues may be better than one. Word Structure 7.2, 153–181.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Esher, Louise. 2017. Morphome death and transfiguration in the history of French. Journal of Linguistics 53.1, 51–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gerber, Pascal & Grollmann, Selin. 2018. What is Kiranti? A critical account. Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics 11.1–2, 99–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hammarström, Harald, Forkel, Robert & Haspelmath, Martin. 2017. Glottolog 3.0. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. Available at http://glottolog.org, accessed 10 May 2019.Google Scholar
Herce, Borja. 2020a. On morphemes and morphomes: Exploring the distinction. Word Structure 13.1, 45–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herce, Borja. 2020b. Alignment of forms in Spanish verbal inflection: The gang poner, tener, venir, salir, valer as a window into the nature of paradigmatic analogy and predictability. Morphology 30, 91–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hodgson, Brian H. 1858. Analysis of the Bahing dialect of the Kiránti language. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 26, 486–522.Google Scholar
Jacques, Guillaume. 2012. Agreement morphology: The case of Rgyalrongic and Kiranti. Language and Linguistics 13.1, 83–116.Google Scholar
Jacques, Guillaume. 2017. A reconstruction of Proto-Kiranti verb roots. Folia Linguistica 51, 177–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacques, Guillaume, Lahaussois, Aimee, Michailovsky, Boyd & Rai, Dhan Bahadur. 2011. An overview of Khaling verbal morphology. Language and Linguistics 13.6, 1095–1170.Google Scholar
Lahaussois, Aimée. 2002. Aspects of the grammar of Thulung Rai: An endangered Himalayan language. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California Berkeley.Google Scholar
Lahaussois, Aimée. 2009. Koyi Rai: An initial grammatical sketch. Himalayan Linguistics Archive 4, 1–33.Google Scholar
Lahaussois, Aimée. 2011. The Thulung Rai verbal system: An account of verb stem alternation. Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale 40.2, 189–224.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lindsay, Mark & Aronoff, Mark. 2013. Natural selection in self-organizing morphological systems. In Hathout, Nabil, Montermini, Fabio & Tseng, Jesse (eds.), Morphology in Toulouse: Selected proceedings of Décembrettes 7 (LINCOM Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 51), 133–153. Munich: Lincom Europa.Google Scholar
Maiden, Martin. 1992. Irregularity as a determinant of morphological change. Journal of Linguistics 28.2, 285–312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maiden, Martin. 2005. Morphological autonomy and diachrony. Yearbook of morphology 2004, 137–175. New York: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maiden, Martin. 2011. Morphomes and ‘stress-conditioned allomorphy’ in Romansh. In Goldbach, Maria, Hinzelin, Marc-Olivier, Maiden, Martin & Smith, John Charles (eds.), Morphological autonomy: Perspectives from Romance inflectional morphology, 36–50. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maiden, Martin. 2017. Romansh allomorphy (Again!). In Bowern, Claire, Horn, Laurence & Zanuttini, Raffaella (eds.), On looking into words (and beyond): Structures, relations, analyses, 189–210. Berlin: Language Science Press.Google Scholar
Maiden, Martin. 2018. The Romance verb: Morphomic structure and diachrony. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michailovsky, Boyd. 1975. Notes on the Kiranti verb (East Nepal). Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 2.2, 183–218.Google Scholar
Michailovsky, Boyd. 1985. Tibeto-Burman dental suffixes: Evidence from Limbu (Nepal). Linguistics of the Sino-Tibetan Area: The State of the Art . Papers presented to Paul K. Benedict for his 71st birthday, 363–375. Canberra: Department of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University.Google Scholar
Michailovsky, Boyd. 1988. La langue hayu [The Hayu language]. Paris: CNRS.Google Scholar
Morin, Yves-Charles. 1988. Morphological conditioning in phonologically transparent processes: Evidence from the evolution of vowel reduction in Vinzelles Occitan. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 33.4, 431–442.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nevins, Andrew. 2011. Phonologically conditioned allomorph selection. In van Oostendorp, Marc, Ewen, Colin J., Hume, Elizabeth & Rice, Keren (eds.), The Blackwell companion to phonology, 1–26. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
O’Neill, Paul. 2011. The Ibero-Romance verb: Allomorphy and the notion of the morphome. Ph.D. dissertation, Oxford University.Google Scholar
O’Neill, Paul. 2013. The morphome and morphosyntactic/semantic features. In Cruschina, Silvio, Maiden, Martin & Smith, John Charles (eds.), The boundaries of pure morphology, 221–246. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Opgenort, Jean Robert. 2004. A grammar of Wambule: Grammar, lexicon, texts, and cultural survey of a Kiranti tribe of eastern Nepal. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Opgenort, Jean Robert. 2005. A grammar of Jero: With a historical comparative study of the Kiranti languages. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Paudyal, Netra Prasad. 2013. Aspects of Chintang syntax. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Zurich.Google Scholar
Rutgers, Roland. 1998. Yamphu: Grammar, texts & lexicon. Leiden: CNWS.Google Scholar
Rami, Saura, Antonio, José. 2003. Elementos de fonética y morfosintaxis benasquesas [Phonetic and morphosyntactic notes on Benasque Aragonese]. Zaragoza: Gara d’Edizions-Institución Fernando el Católico.Google Scholar
Schackow, Diana. 2016. A grammar of Yakkha. Berlin: Language Science Press.Google Scholar
Sharma, Narayan Prasad. 2014. Morphosyntax of Puma, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal. Ph.D. dissertation, SOAS University of London.Google Scholar
Spencer, Andrew. 2016. Stems, the morphome and meaning-bearing inflection. Luís, Ana R. & Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo (eds.), The morphome debate. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stump, Gregory T. 2001. Inflectional morphology: A theory of paradigm structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tolsma, Gerard Jacobus. 1997. The verbal morphology of Kulung. Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas 14, 103–117. Canberra: Australian National University.Google Scholar
Tolsma, Gerard Jacobus. 1999. A grammar of Kulung. Ph.D. dissertation, Leiden University.Google Scholar
van Driem, George. 1993. A grammar of Dumi. Berlin: de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
van Driem, George. 2011. A grammar of Limbu. Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Watters, David E. 2002. A grammar of Kham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Witzlack-Makarevich, Alena, Zakharko, Taras, Bierkandt, Lennart, Zúñiga, Fernando & Bickel, Balthasar. 2016. Decomposing hierarchical alignment: Co-arguments as conditions on alignment and the limits of referential hierarchies as explanations in verb agreement. Linguistics 54.3, 531–561.CrossRefGoogle Scholar