Newari, a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken in Central
Nepal, has had written documents since the 14th century and
is the fifth oldest TB language with manuscripts. This language
is now spoken by half a million people, most of whom inhabit
the Kathmandu Valley.
Despite its long history and large population of native
speakers, Newari has attracted relatively little scholarly attention,
and there are few reliable publications on it. Much more
research should be conducted on this language, since it has
several important keys for examining the proto-TB morphosyntax,
providing link among TB sub-groups.
This paper is a checklist on Newari ergativity. Ergativity
has a close connection with pronominal morphology of TB, one
of the good historical criteria of the language group. Bauman
[1975] made an extensive comparison of pronominal aspects of
TB, thus providing the global scope of TB transitivity types as
well as split. However, he did not discuss Newari directly.
Stimulated by Bauman [1975] and DeLancey [1981], Givon
presented a paper describing Newari ergative morphology.
Although further analysis may be required, his paper provides
the best starting point for the present work. This paper attempts
to supplement that by Givon.
Ergativity is one of the most controversial morphosyntactic
topics of TB linguistics. 'Ergative' is, as I understand it, one of
the transitivity structures in which the transitive agent is marked
syntactically and/or morphologically.
As Bauman pointed out [BADMAN 1975: 221-222], TB has
a variety of morphological types of ergativity, the appearance of
which varies among languages. Hayu, on the one hand,
represents an extreme in which ergative markers consistently
occur and no accusative type is observed. In some languages,
on the other hand, a high optionality of markers (ergative and
accusative) is seen. A very limited number of the TB languages
are consistently ergative and many others belong to 'splitergative'
type. This will be further sub-classified according to
the degree of optionality and mixture of case markers.
Newari is said to belong to split-ergative type; therefore,
the description here will be focussed on how 'split' and/or 'mixed'
it is in terms of ergativity.
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KH_011_4_001.pdf
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