LINGUIST List 17.2276
Wed Aug 09 2006
Diss: Lang Description: Coupe: 'The Mongsen Dialect of Ao: a langua...'
Editor for this issue: Hannah Morales
<hannahlinguistlist.org>
Directory
1. Alexander
Coupe,
The Mongsen Dialect of Ao: a language of Nagaland
Message 1: The Mongsen Dialect of Ao: a language of Nagaland
Date: 09-Aug-2006
From: Alexander Coupe <a.coupelatrobe.edu.au>
Subject: The Mongsen Dialect of Ao: a language of Nagaland
Institution: La Trobe University
Program: Department of Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2003
Author: Alexander Robertson Coupe
Dissertation Title: The Mongsen Dialect of Ao: a language of Nagaland
Linguistic Field(s):
Language Description
Subject Language(s): Naga, Ao (njo)
Dissertation Director:
David Bradley
Dissertation Abstract:
This dissertation presents a comprehensive grammatical description of theMongsen dialect of Ao, a virtually undescribed Tibeto-Burman languagespoken by approximately 70,000 people in Nagaland, north-east India.Mongsen is a tonal, highly agglutinating, mostly suffixing language withpredominantly dependent-marking characteristics. It demonstrates prolificverbal morphology and its verbs are inflected for tense, aspect andmodality. Verb stems are additionally marked by numerous suffixes that havegrammaticalised mostly from lexical verb roots and are used to express arange of resultative, completive and directional meanings, leading to longsequences of agglutinative suffixes. Mongsen discourse is characterised byextensive dependent clause chaining. Clause linkage is almost exclusivelyencoded by non-finite verb forms marked by special converb suffixes thathave grammaticalised from nominalising morphology and case-markingpostpositions.
The thesis consists of twelve chapters and an appendix. An introductiongives background information on the language and its speakers, dialects,village life, geographical setting, the language's genetic classification,its typological profile, and sets out the organisation of the grammaticaldescription in the following chapters. Chapter Two describes the phonologyand morphophonology of Mongsen, compares the phoneme inventories ofdivergent varieties, and accounts for morphophonological processes. ChapterThree deals with the tone system, internal and external tone sandhi, andthe use of intonation to mark phrasal and clausal boundaries.
Word classes are identified on the basis of formal criteria in ChapterFour. A description of clause types, a typologically rare alignment of coregrammatical marking, and the syntax of causation and other valency changingderivations is presented in Chapter Five. The constituents of the nounphrase, relativisation and nominalisation are covered in Chapter Six.Chapter Seven describes the nominal morphology. Chapter Eight presents ananalysis of the extensive verbal morphology. Chapter Nine describesverbless, copula, and existential clauses, and Chapter Ten focuses on thedescription of imperatives. Clause linkage and complementation aredescribed in Chapter Eleven, and Chapter Twelve provides a summary of thework, identifying aspects of grammar that require further investigation. Anappendix containing three interlinearised texts completes the work.
|