On the evolution of the Kham agreement paradigm

• Main Author: DeLancey, Scott
• Other Authors: University of Oregon
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2024
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/179168
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Recent studies of the agreement systems of the "prono-minalizing" Tibeto-Burman languages (Bauman 1974, 1975, 1979, DeLancey 1980, 1981a, 1983, Caughley 1982, Thurgood 1985) have established that the suffixed "pronominal" verb agreement paradigm, once considered to be a late secondary development in a few western branches of the family, is in fact widespread throughout the TB languages, and traceable to the Proto-Tibeto-Burman level.2 There is no reasonable doubt that most of the agreement paradigms found in the family represent com¬mon inheritance -- often, to be sure, with considerable reana¬lysis and secondary alteration -- of an original paradigm in which the ST pronominal roots *na '1st person' and *na(n) '2nd person' were suffixed to the verb in a split ergative pattern. (See DeLancey 1981b for a discussion of the notion of split ergativity and its relevance to some of the data discussed here).