VOICE AND VALENCE-ALTERING OPERATIONS IN FALAM CHIN

384 Pages·2010·4.75 MB·English

VOICE AND VALENCE-ALTERING OPERATIONS
IN FALAM CHIN: A ROLE AND
REFERENCE GRAMMAR
APPROACH

by

DEBORAH KING

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON
December 2010
Copyright © by Deborah King 2010
All Rights Reserved
DEDICATION
To my mother, who first taught me, and to my father, who now “knows as he is
known” (I Corinthians 13:12).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Where is God my Maker, who gives songs in the night,
who teaches us more than the beasts of the earth and makes us
wiser than the birds of the heavens?
Job 35:10-111

A few pages of acknowledgements are wholly inadequate to express my thanks to
those who have labored with me on this dissertation. Truly God, the “giver of every good
gift and every perfect gift” (James 1:17), has blessed me with every needed resource
along the way. Apart from Him, I can do nothing (John 15:5); with Him, all things are
possible (Matthew 19:26). He “hem[med] me in, behind and before, and [laid His] hand
upon me” (Psalm 139:5). May He receive the glory.
Each member of my dissertation committee deserves special recognition for their
unique contribution to the writing and refining of this work. Dr. Jerold A. Edmondson,
my supervising professor, has been a constant encouragement from the beginning of my
studies at the University of Texas at Arlington, with his enthusiasm for little-studied
languages and for the thrill of discovery. I am especially grateful for his willingness to
spend long hours fine-tuning various aspects of my discussion. I am also extremely
grateful to Dr. Michael Boutin, who constantly went above and beyond the call of duty,
giving me extensive help with formatting, always pointing me to helpful resources, and
sharing with me his constant encouragement and enthusiasm for RRG. In addition, two
members of my committee graciously agreed to join after the dissertation was already

1 All Scripture references are taken from the English Standard Version.
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underway. Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald’s help with organization is much appreciated. Dr. Joey
Sabbagh also spent many hours of discussion with me, encouraging me to rethink my
assumptions and pushing me to sharpen and clarify my argumentation. Thank you all.
Furthermore, I would like to thank Dr. Don Burquest for his help in preparing and
defending my proposal and Dr. Paul Kroeger for his help with my proposal, as well as his
comments on Chapter 2 of this dissertation. Thanks are also due to Dr. Robert Van Valin,
Jr., for reading my dissertation and returning helpful comments which have clarified my
thinking on many aspects of RRG.
To each of my language consultants, to whom I owe much more than I can ever
repay, I am more grateful than I can say. Thank you, Paul Van Hre, Dr. Mang Herh, Phun
Khar Thang, Peter Lal Din Thar, Eunice Ngungte, Hniang Tum, and Samuel Ngun
Thawm Lian. Your selfless sacrifice of your time, sharing of your knowledge, and
commitment to the good of the Falam Chin people have touched and changed me. Ka
lung a awi zet. A special thanks is due to Dr. Mang Herh, who painstakingly proofread
and corrected all the examples used in this dissertation.
I am further grateful to the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and to Drs. Ben
and Trudy Termini for their provision of a travel grant to fund research travel to Burma.
In addition, I would like to thank the Graduate School for a four year Graduate
Fellowship and the Linguistics Department for the Dissertation Completion Fellowships
which helped to fund my final year and a half of studies.
Last, but not least, I would like to thank all my dear family and friends who have
prayed for me and encouraged me over these many years of seemingly interminable
v
study. My dear mother deserves special recognition for her emotional support through
this journey and for letting me talk her ear off about linguistics all the time. Thanks,
Mom—I love you.

November 2, 2010
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ABSTRACT

VOICE AND VALENCE-ALTERING OPERATIONS
IN FALAM CHIN: A ROLE AND
REFERENCE GRAMMAR
APPROACH

Deborah King, Ph.D.

The University of Texas at Arlington, 2010

Supervising Professor: Jerold A. Edmondson
This dissertation describes and analyzes voice and valence-altering operations in
Falam Chin, a Tibeto-Burman language of Burma. The data is explained within the
framework of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), which supplies several key concepts
particularly useful for generalizing the behavior of the Falam Chin operations. The first is
RRG’s system of semantic decomposition, based on Dowty (1979), which is used to
formulate each predicate’s underlying logical structure (LS). Second is the concept of
macroroles, generalized semantic roles actor and undergoer, which are assigned to the
arguments of a predicate according to a hierarchy of LS positions. M-transitivity refers to
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the number of macroroles assigned to a given predicate (Van Valin & LaPolla 1997; Van
Valin 2005).
Within this framework, each of the primary voice and valence-altering operations
of Falam Chin are shown to be lexical operations which affect the underlying LS and/or
macrorole assignment of the base predicate. Causatives and applicatives are valence-
raising operations which fuse two LSs by means of a lexical rule, such that their
arguments are treated as the arguments of a single predicate. On the other hand,
reflexives, reciprocals, and middles assign coreferentiality to two arguments of the base
predicate, after which they lower M-transitivity by joining the macroroles of the two
coreferential arguments into a single macrorole. Finally, antipassives lower M-transitivity
by blocking macrorole assignment to the lower-ranking argument of the base predicate.
While Falam Chin displays both dependent-marking and head-marking
characteristics, this dissertation argues that it is a fundamentally head-marking language.
As is characteristic of head-marking languages, Falam Chin’s NPs are in semantic
apposition to its cross-reference pronominals, which are the true core arguments. In light
of this, a number of unusual features of Falam Chin’s voice and valence-altering
operations are revealed to be natural results of its head-marking makeup. Furthermore, as
claimed by Nichols (1986), head-marking languages tend to downplay syntactic
distinctions in favor of semantic and pragmatic ones, a characteristic evident in Falam
Chin’s preference for lexical operations with semantic and pragmatic functions.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... iv
ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................... vii
LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................... xiv
LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................................... xviii
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS ..............................................................xx
Chapter Page
1. INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................1
1.1 An introduction to Falam Chin and Chin languages ..............................2
1.1.1 Sociolinguistic background .....................................................3
1.1.2 Falam Chin literature ..............................................................5
1.1.3 Other Chin literature .............................................................14
1.2 Literature review ..................................................................................28
1.2.1 Grammatical relations ...........................................................29
1.2.2 Valence and transitivity ........................................................33
1.2.3 Voice and valence-altering operations ..................................36
1.3 Research questions ...............................................................................57
1.4 Methodology ........................................................................................59
1.5 Organization .........................................................................................60
2. FALAM CHIN GRAMMAR OVERVIEW ......................................................61
ix
2.1 Morphology..........................................................................................62
2.1.1 Phrasal affixes .......................................................................62
2.1.2 Inflectional morphology: Verbal stem alternations ..............76
2.1.3 Derivational morphology ......................................................78
2.2 Noun phrases ........................................................................................82
2.2.1 Types of nominals .................................................................82
2.2.2 NP ordering ...........................................................................88
2.3 The clause ............................................................................................97
2.3.1 Types of predicates ...............................................................97
2.3.2 Clause ordering .....................................................................99
2.4 The sentence.......................................................................................110
2.4.1 Types of clauses ..................................................................110
2.4.2 Clausal coordination ...........................................................122
2.4.3 Non-indicative sentence patterns (mood) ...........................123
2.5 Conclusion .........................................................................................128
3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:
ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR ...............................................129
3.1 The layered structure of the clause and NP .......................................131
3.1.1 The constituent projection...................................................131
3.1.2 The operator projection .......................................................148
3.2 Aktionsart, logical structures, and semantic macroroles ....................150
3.2.1 Verb classes (Aktionsart classes) ........................................150
3.2.2 Logical structures ................................................................154
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