SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

The Tamang aspectual genitive, and regularisation versus divergence in linguistic change

While most hitherto documented varieties of Tamang (Taylor, 1973; Yonjan, 1997; Mazaudon, 2003; Chalise, 2005; Poudel, 2006) now employ a one-time dative morpheme -la (see Noonan, 2011) to mark genitive case, many northern and western dialects retain an older genitive -ki (see DeLancey, 1984) in some format. This is the case on the eastern bank of the Indrawati Khola in Sindhupalchok District (Central Nepal), where -la has been adopted only for marking referents which function as syntactic heads, creating a kind of double marking: -ki-la. In this dialect, -la is probably best analysed as a nominalizer, which pronominalizes the possessee and creates a  systematic morphological distinction between genitive dependents and heads. This distinction is exploited in a range of constructions, including possessive and adverbial clauses, and occurs in a phenomenon apparently quite rare in Eurasia: use of the genitive case to express perfect aspect. While the relationship of perfect aspectual forms to the genitive case is relatively transparent in this dialect due to their participation in the overt dependent/head distinction mentioned above, similar constructions appear in other Tamang dialects (Chalise, 2005; Poudel, 2006), using the innovative form of genitive marking -la which has been adopted in the more canonical environment (ie. the noun phrase).

This paper considers this unusual development in Tamang in light of other instances of the genitive case in verbal constructions in Tamangic and Bodic languages (most prominently Tibetan), and argues that data from across the group show two opposing tendencies in the context of linguistic change: while speakers of some languages (Tamang amongst them) appear to have made an effort to retain“regularity” across forms which are somehow perceived to be similar, in others (for instance Manange: see Hildebrandt, 2004) morphological change has led to the divergence of constructions which once had a transparent relationship, vestiges of which may only be visible in apparently ephemeral irregularities in the current language.