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Article published In:
Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area
Vol. 45:1 (2022) ► pp.93–109

Tangut verb agreement

Optional or not?

| Inalco & Crlao , France

The Tangut language is of particular importance to the field of Sino­Tibetan Studies, notably because of its morphological conservatism, which is unexpectedly correlated with a simplification of its syllable structure, a consequence of a process Miyake (2012) called “compression”. Such conservatism is evident in the syllable qualities reconstructed, which sometimes reflect proto­ Tangut’s ancient derivational processes. Verbs also exhibit various flectional phenomena, mainly due to conversion of agreement rules and referential hierarchy rules (Silverstein 1976), in a manner reminiscent of the indexation system of languages of the rGyalrongic taxon within the Qiangic family. The present paper attempts to explain the absence of indexation in the Tangut verb, a key phenomenon in the history of verb agreement analysis. First, I recall the main rules of the Tangut verb’s agreement system, as shown by Kepping (1975) and Gong (2001). Second, cases of non­agreement are analyzed. Apart from the case of non­local contexts, we see that the absence of agreement occurs in non­finite forms resulting from a dependency pattern, such as clause chaining, topic/comment context, and semantically dependent modality. [1] 1

Keywords: Tangut, verb agreement, dependency, clause chaining
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The rules of agreement
      • 1.1.1Intransitive verbs
      • 1.1.2Transitive verbs
      • 1.1.3The dual suffixes
    • 1.2Is agreement optional or mandatory?
  • 2.Clues to the mandatoriness of agreement
  • 3.Clause chaining dependency
  • 4.Conditional dependency
  • 5.Topic/comment dependency
  • 6.Modal dependencies
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • Bibliography
Published online: 2 June 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ltba.21008.bea
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