Netra Prasad Paudyal

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The dissertation aims to give a descriptive overview of Chintang Syntax. It focuses primarily on noun phrase structure, basic clauses, complement clauses, nominalization strategies and various types of adverbial clauses in Chintang. However, it also deals with the basic phonology, morphology (both nominal and verbal) and the various types of particles and discourse markers in order to give an impression of Chintang grammar as a whole.

(This is my forthcoming research project. Actually, this is a continuation from my Master's thesis in Tribhuvan University (2003). In this work, I analyse the most archaic variety of the Darai language, spoken in the Pipaltar VDC, Tanahun, Nepal.)

The Darai (ISO 639-3: dry) language is spoken primarily in the inner Terai and the western hill area of the Tanahũ, Pālpā and Gorkhā districts of Nepal. Tanahũ has relatively large village clusters consisting of numerous hamlets in the foothills and on the banks of the Mādi and Nārāyani rivers. The language is spoken throughout the entire ridge of the mid-western mountains up to the border of Gorkhā, Pālpā, Chitwan and Nawalparāsi districts. Darais have also recently settled on the plains of Chitwan district. The social situation contributes to the fact that Darai is increasingly being supplanted by the Nepali and Thāru languages. The variety of the Darai language spoken in Chitwan is different from Pipaltār (Tanahũ) and Damauli; so there are already three dialects of Darai (viz. Chitwan, Damauli and Pipaltār) identified in my previous research (Paudyal 2003). At a purely lexical level, based on cognate counts from the Swadesh 100 word list, the similarity between the major branches of Darai is about 50 to 60 %, which exhibits a high level of intelligibility between them. The count between Chitwan and Damauli, for example, is 57 %, while intelligibility between Chitwan and Pipaltār is lower (Paudyal 2003). All three names of the dialects are exonyms, and the speakers themselves, regardless of their dialect, refer to their language simply as Darai Kurā (kurā is a Nepali term for ‘language’). This is the language Grierson (1909) calls Darhi and Dahi and Hodgson (1874) calls Dadhi.

The Darai and their ancestral language are somewhat of an enigma. Physically the Darai resemble many ethnic groups speaking Tibeto-Burman languages. But linguistically they speak an Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-European family. Darai religion is highly syncretic and in many respects does not conform to orthodox Hinduism. For example, worshipping ancestors and nature (eg. sansāri devī), offering and consuming alcoholic drinks (local beer), and shamanic healing are part and parcel of their religion.

The Darai language is on the verge of extinction. Though the total number of the Darai population is estimated to be 10,210 (CBS report 2001), there are barely 1000 active speakers of the language. If nothing happens it is likely that the current or the next generation will be the last one to speak Darai. This language does not have its own written tradition (they use the Devanagari script nowadays), and it will definitely vanish within a very short period of time. The reasons for the decline in the use of Darai are many and varied. Prominent among them is undoubtedly the one-nation-one-language policy of the Nepalese state in the past. At present people are increasingly aware of the need for language preservation and promotion, but without a supportive language policy by the state and without support from the government, most of the minority languages of Nepal are doomed to extinction. Nepali as the national, official language is being used extensively in administration, education, the media and so on, and therefore speakers of other languages have no choice but to use their language less and Nepali more. As opportunities for using their own languages decrease, the younger generation tends to use more Nepali, thus losing their language loyalty.

This paper is case study of three-argument verbs in the Southeastern subbranch of Kiranti, a Sino-Tibetan group of language spoken in Nepal. The data that we have available for exploring ditransitives comes from two languages of the group: Chintang and Belhare.

Nominalization is one of the highly productive phenomena of Tibeto-Burman languages (Matisoff 1972, Noonan 1997, Bickel 1999, Watters 2006, 2008, Genetti et al. 2008, 2011). The functions of nominalizers and nominalization constructions in these languages are often quite diverse and extended (Yap et al. 2011). In a number of Tibeto-Burman languages including the Kiranti sub-group, nominalization is not limited to its standard function of deriving nominals from individual words of other classes, but it also applies to clausal and sentence-level elements alike. In fact, nominalization is a major tool for creating various types of syntactic structures, such as attributive phrases, relative clauses, complement clauses and temporal clauses. In addition, there are nominalization constructions that often appear independently, which is a phenomenon commonly referred to as 'standalone' or 'non-embedded' nominalization (Bickel 1999; Watters 2008). These constructions are quite common across the Kirant area. There are a large number of studies which deal with the various aspects and functions of nominalization in Tibeto-Burman languages. Matisoff (1972) was the first to point out the relationship between Nominalization, Relativization and Genitivization in Lahu1, where all these functions are expressed by a single particle -ve. This type of conformity of syntactic functions in various Sino-Tibetan languages, including Kiranti languages, has been termed as ‘Standard Sino-Tibetan Nominalization’ (SSTN in short) in Bickel (1999: 271).

Agreement with both Agent and Object marking is a typologically less common feature of the languages of the world. It is rare in Indo-European/ Indo-Aryan languages. However, it is widespread in many Sino-Tibetan languages including Kiranti, Siberian and Caucasian languages as well. Darai stands out in this respect from other Indo-European languages not only because it has poly-personal agreement where both the subject and the object trigger agreement in transitive clause, but also due to its linear agreement of arguments in terms of person hierarchy. Besides this, it is also unique for hierarchical agreement marking where the highest-ranking non-first person argument triggers the agreement in some persons of the paradigms. This is reported to be an uncommon feature of the languages of the world; and it has not been observed yet in South Asian languages. But it has been reported for a number of Native American languages (Mithun 1991, 1999, Jany 2008).

In Chintang (Sino-Tibetan, Kiranti) both finite and non-finite
adverbial clauses are found. In this paper we discuss only
non-finite subordinate clauses in terms of their control
behaviour, S/A coreferentiality, scope and other morpho-
syntactic properties. An interesting feature of Chintang non-
finite adverbial clause is their the person and number
marking.

Although there is some literature on compound and complex verbs (Boyé 1999, Pokharel 1999, Lohani 2003), as well as on finite verbs (Genetti 1999), no work has been done on three-argument verbs and the ways they code arguments in Nepali. This paper is the first work which describes three-argument verb constructions in Nepali. The linguistic data for this paper was mostly collected following the Questionnaire on Ditransitive Constructions (Comrie et al. 2009) and the ditransitive paper (Malchukov et al. 2009). It describes and analyses the coding properties and different types of syntactic alignments. It also addresses the effect of animacy and definiteness in differential object marking in Nepali.1 Moreover, it also deals with the behavioural properties of three-argument constructions with regard to a number of syntactic constructions such as passivization, incorporation, constituent questions, reciprocalization, reflexivization, relativization and Quantifier float.

This article demonstrates prefix permutability in Chintang (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal) that is not constrained by any semantic or morphosyntactic structure, or by any dialect, sociolect, or idiolect choice —a phenomenon ruled out by standard assumptions about grammatical words. The prefixes
are fully fledged parts of grammatical words and are different from clitics on a large number of standard criteria. The analysis of phonological word domains suggests that prefix permutability is a side-effect of prosodic subcategorization: prefixes occur in variable orders because each prefix
and each stem element project a phonological word of their own, and each such word can host a prefix, at any position.

(draft)
There are no typological studies dedicated to compound verbs in Kiranti languages. However, this phenomenon does occur extensively in a number of Kiranti languages (eg, Belhare (Bickel 1996), Athpare (Ebert 1997), Bantawa (Doornenbal 2009), Chamling (Ebert 1997), Kulung (Tolsma 1999), and Thulung (Lahaussois 2002). Chintang also employs a wide variety of different types of complex predicates. Verbal compounding is extremely frequent in the Chintang corpus in comparison to the occurrence of simple verbs. There is no fixed terminology for vector verbs in Kiranti literature; various names are given to them by various linguists, for example, Weidert & Subba (1985), Tolsma (1999), Rutgers (1998) use the term ‘auxiliary’,  Opgenort (2002) describes this feature as ‘motionalisers’, van Driem (1987, 1993) and Lahaussois (2002) use the term ‘aspectivizers’, Ebert (1997) uses the term compound verb in her works on Camling and Athpare. However, I refer the vectors simply as v2 to make it more clear in this work.