Introduction

This paper has a fairly modest primary goal: to remove a question mark ‘?’ which appears to the right of Galo (i.e., ‘Gallong’) in Sun's (1993; Sun 2003) provisional family tree of the Tani branch of Tibeto-Burman languages (Figure 1).

The question mark appears in Sun's tree for a good reason: as he was compiling his masterful comparative-historical study of the Tani languages in the years leading up to 1993, most of the evidence available to Sun suggested aligning Galo genetically with Western Tani languages such as Hills Miri, Nyishi and Tagin. At the same time, though, Galo exhibited several features which were more characteristic of Eastern Tani languages such as Bori, Padam and Mising. At the time of Sun's writing, there was no obvious means of understanding why this should have been the case. The paper's second goal, then, will be to attempt to explain this situation on the basis of data and observations from the Western/Eastern Tani border areas obtained during 2008–2009.

Specifically, I will argue that while Sun was correct to align Galo genetically with Western Tani, a long history of population contacts and mutual influence among Galo and the neighboring Eastern Tani group Minyong (Adi) has led to cultural-linguistic convergence, and to a tendency for some Galo dialects to acquire certain Eastern Tani traits. In the process, my hope is that something will be learned about how intrasubgroup cultural-linguistic contact and convergence can operate in the Tibeto-Burman region, and can considerably complicate (though, I will argue, not fatally weaken) an overall picture of genetic descent.

Background

The Boro-Garo languages form an unusually well-defined subgroup within the Tibeto-Burman family. At one time or another I have listened to a good many of these languages, some a half-century ago and for no more than a single session of elicitation, others more recently and with great care. My memory is hardly sharp for all of these languages, but in the course of this listening I have been struck by the frequency with which the languages of this group have exactly six simple monophthongs. (They all have a number of diphthongs as well, but I will have nothing to say about them in this paper).

Five of the monophthongs seem always to be the vowels that are most widespread in the languages of the world, those easily written as i, e, a, o and u. It is clear, moreover, that in most, perhaps all, Boro-Garo languages, these five vowels are mutual cognates and reconstructable to five vowels in ancestral Boro-Garo (Joseph and Burling 2006). The simplicity of these vowel systems is striking when contrasted with the vowel systems of many other Tibeto-Burman languages, both in North East India and elsewhere. Many of these other languages have more vowels, and more varied vowels, than do the languages of the Boro-Garo sub-group.

In addition to these five familiar monophthongs, however, most Boro-Garo languages also have a sixth vowel, one that has quite a different character, and one that is more variable from one language to another than any of the familiar five.

Introduction

Sumi (also known as ‘Sema’) is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nagaland, North East India. Previous research on Sumi, including Hutton's (1968 [1921]) seminal work and Sreedhar's (1976) phonetic reader and (1980) grammar, describe three contrastive tones in the language but fail to provide adequate or consistent transcriptions of these tones. Consequently, little work has been done on the tonal phonology in this language, and none at all on the interaction between tone and morphology.

Recent fieldwork has shown that tone changes are frequent in the derivation of nominals from verbs in Sumi. For instance, pi [pì] ‘to speak’ has low tone, while its deverbal counterpart akipi [akipí] ‘speaking; speech’ has mid and high tone. This article will demonstrate how such deverbal nominals are formed and describe any accompanying tone changes. It will also show that the syllable structure of the verb plays an important role in deverbal formation.

Finally, a possible historical origin for such tone changes will be proposed by looking at deverbal formation in other related languages, including Khezha, Tenyidie (Angami) and Mao, which Burling (2003) has grouped together in a proposed ‘Angami-Pochuri’ group. Figure 1 shows the position of Sumi (called ‘Simi’) in this group.

Introduction

The term reciprocal construction refers to specialized patterns used in languages to encode reciprocity. Reciprocity is understood as: (a) a kind of symmetrical situation between two mutuants, i.e., participants or arguments, that are engaged in a mutual situation, where (b) the relation between the mutuants A and B is the same as that between B and A (Haspelmath 2007: 2087; Lichtenberk 1985: 21). Put differently, a reciprocal construction encodes a mutual relationship between at least two non-identical participants simultaneously engaged in an identical situation. Some of the most widespread reciprocal strategies which get conventionalized in grammars are affixes, pronouns and clitics (Nedjalkov 2007: 102). Cross-linguistically, the pronominal reciprocal is the most common among syntactic reciprocals, while affixes are one of the important types of morphological devices, and clitics fall into an intermediate position between the two (Nedjalkov 2007: 102). Apart from syntactic and morphological reciprocal strategies, languages may have lexical reciprocal, which is to say lexical words with inherent reciprocal meanings; such words are used for denoting mutual configurations by themselves, and need not occur in a special grammatical construction (Haspelmath 2007; Knjazev 2007).

This chapter presents a descriptive analysis of the various strategies employed in Asamiya (Assamese) for encoding reciprocity in mono-clausal constructions. It is organized into five sections: following this Introduction, §2 is a brief overview of Asamiya.

Introduction

Tiwa, also known as Lalung, is a Tibeto-Burman language of the Bodo-Garo subfamily, and has 27,072 speakers in the Indian state of Assam. Not much is known about the linguistic features of the Tiwa language, and still less is known of its phonology. In this work, we investigate the tones of the Tiwa language with the help of instrumental acoustic measures supported by statistical tests in order to determine the types of tones that exist in the language. We also examine the acoustic characteristics that may help native speakers to distinguish the tones in Tiwa. Furthermore, we investigate how tones operate in non-derived monosyllabic words in the language.

By means of acoustic measures of speech samples collected from nine speakers, plus interviews with native speakers of the language, we come to the conclusion that Tiwa has two lexical tones: a falling tone and a rising tone, and that fundamental frequency (F0) or pitch serves as the major cue in distinguishing among the tones. We also demonstrate that Tiwa is a word-tone language system in which only one tone is assigned to each lexical word of the language, regardless of its syllable quantity.

As with most of the Bodo-Garo languages, not much has been written about Tiwa language. However, the tone systems of the subfamily have received considerable interest; for example, by Baro (1991), Basumatary (2005), Bhattacharya (1977), Burling (1959), Halvorsrud (1959), Joseph and Burling (2001, 2007), Sarmah and Wiltshire (2010a), and Weidert (1987).

Introduction

Languages use some grammatical devices for specifying that a particular utterance is to be understood, not as an assertion, but as a request for information, known as interrogation or question formation. In written text a question mark may be used to denote an interrogative structure, but in spoken form punctuation cannot be used and it is stress patterns or some grammatical system or context that may give a clue to an utterance being interrogative. Questioning represents one of the unique characteristics of the human mind and the ways of forming questions vary from language to language which need to be explored from the linguistic point of view. This paper investigates various ways of forming questions in Asamiya (Assamese).

In a majority of the languages questions can be broadly classified into two major groups according to the type of answer anticipated (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 161, 168). These are: a) general questions (also known as closed or polar), and b) special questions (also known as open, content or wh-questions in English). In section 2 of this paper various subcategories of general questions are examined. Section 3 contains the discussion on special questions.

General questions

Typologically, general questions include ‘yes/no’ questions and ‘alternative’ questions.

Yes/no questions

Yes/no questions, one of the subcategories of general questions in Asamiya, is formed by suffixation of a question clitic (QC) -ne to the finite verb or by the insertion of a question particle (QP) neki after it.