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 
  
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1. © 2014 Linda Anna Konnerth  
2.   
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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 
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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>