and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy  

 

March 2014

 ii

DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE

 

Student: Linda Anna Konnerth

 

Title: A Grammar of Karbi

 

This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of Linguistics by:

 

Scott DeLancey Chair

Spike Gildea Core Member

Doris Payne Core Member

Zhuo Jing-Schmidt Institutional Representative

 

and

 

Kimberly Andrews Espy Vice President for Research and Innovation;

 Dean of the Graduate School  

 

Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School.

 

Degree awarded March 2014

 

 iii

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. © 2014 Linda Anna Konnerth  

2.  

 iv

DISSERTATION ABSTRACT

 

Linda Anna Konnerth

 

Doctor of Philosophy

 

Department of Linguistics

 

March 2014

 

Title: A Grammar of Karbi

 

 

Karbi is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken by half a million people in the

Karbi Anglong district in Assam, Northeast India, and surrounding areas in the extended

Brahmaputra Valley area. It is an agglutinating, verb-final language.  

This dissertation offers a description of the dialect spoken in the hills of the Karbi

Anglong district. It is primarily based on a corpus that was created during a total of

fifteen months of original fieldwork, while building on and expanding on research

reported by Grüßner in 1978. While the exact phylogenetic status of Karbi inside TB has

remained controversial, this dissertation points out various putative links to other TB

languages.  

The most intriguing aspect of Karbi phonology is the tone system, which carries a

low functional load. While three tones can be contrasted on monosyllabic roots, the rich

agglutinating morphology of Karbi allows the formation of polysyllabic words, at which

level tones lose most of their phonemicity, while still leaving systematic phonetic traces.  

Nouns and verbs represent the two major word classes of Karbi at the root level;

property-concept terms represent a subclass of verbs.  

At the heart of Karbi morphosyntax, there are two prefixes of Proto-TB

provenance that have diachronically shaped the grammar of the language: the possessive

prefix a- and the nominalizer ke-. Possessive a- attaches to nouns that are modified by

preposed elements and represents the most frequent morpheme in the corpus.

Nominalization involving ke- forms the basis for a variety of predicate constructions,

including most of Karbi subordination as well as a number of main clause constructions.

discussed (§3.9.1), as well as the allomorphy of and/or resulting from the prefixes ke-

‘nominalizer’, pV- ‘causative’, che- ‘reflexive/reciprocal’, and cho- ‘auto-

benefactive/malefactive’ (§3.9.2).  

For a thorough discussion of phonological strategies involved in the nativization

of especially older (rather than more recent) borrowed lexical items, see Grüßner (1978:

28-33). Grüßner points out what happens with onset voiced aspirated stops from Indic,

onset clusters such as /sm/, /skh/, and /sy/ from Khasi, and documents vowel changes and

tone assignment.

3.1. Consonants

There are a total of 18 consonant phonemes in Karbi that contrast with each other

in minimal sets. All but one of the 18 phonemes, which is the velar nasal /ŋ/, occur at the

 55

beginning of syllables (see §3.1.1 and Table 8), whereas the syllable coda position is

limited to a much more restricted set of consonants (see §3.1.2 and Table 16).

3.1.1. Consonant Onsets  

In the class of syllable onset consonants (see Table 8), stops are the only manner

of articulation that exists at all places of articulation except for the glottal stop.

Phonetically, there is a glottal stop in the language, which, however, only surfaces as part

of the mid tone and occurs in conjunction with glottalization across the whole syllable

(see §3.5), as well as with syllable-initial vowels (§3.3). Note that Table 8 shows one

phoneme in two different cells: the palatal /ɟ~j/ has allophonic variation in its manner of

articulation, and is therefore given as both a stop and a glide. Details will be discussed

below.

 

Table 8. Syllable-initial consonants35

 Bilabial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal

Stops

b

 

p

 

ph~ɸ

<ph>

d

 

t

 

   th

<th>

ɟ~j

<j>

   c

<ch>