TOPICS IN HAKHA LAI NOMINAL MARKING

This dissertation investigates the formal and functional properties of discourse deictics, morphemes which provide information to help interlocutors identify nominals, mark their discourse status, and highlight them for pragmatic purposes. Discourse deictics remain understudied, despite serving varied and complex functions. This work investigates Hakha Lai, a South Central (formerly Kuki-Chin) Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Chin state in Burma and in diaspora communities worldwide. Hakha Lai discourse deictics are derived from the spatial deictic markers of the demonstrative paradigm, where they encode information about the spatial location of discourse referents in relation to speaker and addressee location. In non-demonstrative contexts, they mark discourse-level properties of nominal referents (e.g., topic status; prior discourse reference) and aid in semantic and pragmatic interpretation. This dissertation investigates elicitation data collected in collaboration with three fluent speakers of Hakha Lai. Elicitation materials, carefully designed to control discourse context information, were adapted from three questionnaires which tested the role of nominal markers in encoding: 1) the spatial deictic properties of demonstratives (Wilkins 1999); 2) the information status of the nominal (Aissen 2015); and 3) other referential properties of the nominal (Jenks 2015). Methodological innovations employed to address the difficulty inherent in investigating discourse/pragmatic markers through elicitation included providing discrete narrative contexts in which target utterances were used, eliciting target utterances appropriate for the context, and conducting followup judgement tasks with modified utterances containing discourse deictics. In the judgement tasks, speakers judged not only the grammaticality of nominals marked with discourse deictics but also viii their acceptability in the given discourse context, thus providing data on the nature of their functional properties. This investigation contributes to ongoing research on the morphosemantics of discourse information marking, and informs future work on nominal reference, topic and focus, differential case marking, and the unique properties of South Central Tibeto-Burman languages.

Grantor dc:publisher

[Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Wamsley, James Christian

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Berkson, Kelly

• Tibeto-Burman Languages
• Field Linguistics
• Semantics

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2022/29311

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarworks.iu.edu:2022/29311