Rajbanshi grammar, Języki

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
A Sketch of the Phonology and
Grammar of Rājbanshi
Christopher P. Wilde
Academic dissertation to be publicly discussed, by due permission
of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki in auditorium XII,
on the 7
th
of March, 2008, at 10 o’clock.
University of Helsinki
Department of General Linguistics
P.O. Box 9 (Siltavuorenpenger 20 A)
FIN-00014 University of Helsinki
Finland
PUBLICATIONS
NO. 43
2008
Cover image:
A Rājbanshi woman and village children (Jhāpā, Nepal)
ISSN 0355-7170
ISBN 978-952-10-4464-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-952-10-4465-6 (PDF)
Helsinki 2008
Helsinki University Print
To my father and mother
Peter and Viivi Wilde
Abstract
This dissertation is a synchronic description of the phonology and grammar of two dialects of
the Rājbanshi language (Eastern Indo-Aryan) as spoken in Jhāpā, Nepal. The grammatical
analysis is based, for the most part, on a corpus of narrative text which was recorded and
transcribed from three informants from north-east Jhāpā. Additional material elicited from a
fourth informant from south-west Jhāpā has also been consulted. I have primarily confined the
analysis to the oral expression, since the emerging literary form is still in its infancy.
I have attempted to describe the phonology, morphology and syntax of the language, and
also one aspect of its discourse structure. For the most part the phonology follows the basic
Indo-Aryan pattern. Derivational morphology, compounding, reduplication, echo formation
and onomatopoetic constructions will be considered, as well as number, noun classes (their
assignment and grammatical function), pronouns, and case and postpositions.
In verbal morphology I will cover the causative stems, the copula, primary and secondary
agreement, tense, aspect, mood, auxiliary constructions and non-finite forms. The term
“secondary agreement” here refers to genitive agreement, dative-subject agreement and patient
(and sometimes patient-agent) agreement. The breaking of default agreement rules has a range
of pragmatic inferences, and I will advance a governing principle of “affectedness” to explain
this phenomenon. I will argue for a distinction to be made between conjunct verbs,
derivational compound verbs and quasi-aspectual compound verbs based on formal, semantic
and statistical grounds.
Rājbanshi has an open set of adjectives, and it additionally makes use of a restricted set of
nouns which can function as adjectives. Various particles, and the emphatic and conjunctive
clitics will also be considered. The syntactic structures studied include: non-declarative speech
acts, phrase-internal and clause-internal constituent order, negation, subordination,
coordination and valence adjustment.
I will explain how the future, present and past tenses in Rājbanshi oral narratives seem not
to maintain a time reference, but to indicate a distinction between background and foreground
information. I will call this “tense neutralisation”.
Appendix 1 presents verb paradigms, mostly from the Jhāpā dialects, but also including an
incomplete paradigm from two dialects spoken in Morang. Appendix 2 comprises a complete
lexicon of the words found in this work. Appendix 3 consists of the text corpus on which this
grammatical analysis is based.
Audio recordings of the transcribed text corpus, together with twenty-four other non-
transcribed texts from a range of dialects throughout Morang and Jhāpā, can be found on the
accompanying CD.
v
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

  • zanotowane.pl
  • doc.pisz.pl
  • pdf.pisz.pl
  • tejsza.htw.pl

    •