LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 14:10 October 2014
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Grammaticalization in the Morphosyntactic Study of Meiteilon
Grammaticalization of the Verb /lak/ ‘come’

Wahengbam Saritarani, Ph.D. Scholar
N. Pramodini, Ph.D.

Abstract

This paper aims to study the grammaticalization of motion verb /lak/ ‘come’ in Meiteilon, a Tibeto-Burman language. The grammaticalization path of the Meiteilon motion verb /lak/ ‘come’ has developed into four morphemes, namely /-l´k-, -lu-, -l´-,-l´m-/ indicating different grammatical functions. Verb root /lak/ in the position of V2 in a serial verb construction undergoes grammaticalization which takes the path: movement>spatial>temporal.

Key words: grammaticalization, Meiteilon, nonce-concatenation, derivational morphology, morpheme.

1. Introduction

The grammaticalization of deictic suffixes is a common phenomenon in Tibeto-Burman languages. DeLancy (1985) notes that this is a cyclic process, the directive categories being regularly invented in Tibeto-Burman languages, and almost as regularly lost again.

This paper is an attempt to investigate the relevance of grammaticalization of the motion verb /lak/ ‘come’ in the morphosyntactic structure of Meiteilon from the view point of current grammaticalization theories (for example, Hopper 1987, Bolinger 1980, Heine, et.al 1991, 1992, Hopper and Traugott 1993). Meiteilon, a verb final Tibeto-Burman language, is observed to be taking the agglutinative nature, that is, suffixing many units of morphemes to the verb root to accommodate the grammatical designations and semantic connotations. This phenomenon can be viewed from the angle of grammaticalization of lexical item being deducted to small morphemes to serve grammatical functions.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Wahenbam Saritarani, Ph.D. Scholar
Department of Linguistics
Manipur University
Imphal
Canchipur - 795003
Manipur
India
wahengbamsaritarani@gmail.com

N. Pramodini, Ph.D. Corresponding Author
Department of Linguistics
Manipur University
Canchipur - 795003
Manipur
India
npdini@yahoo.co.in
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