Himalayan Linguistics

This memoriam honors Barbara Frances Kelly, our friend and colleague, who passed away on 14 December, 2022.

The present study is an investigation of the information-structural notion of focus through the morphosyntax of focus structures in Mùwe Ké (Tibeto-Burman, Mugu, Nepal).  The focus structures mainly involve the obligatory marking of actors with the otherwise-optional ergative marker -gane/-gadiː and a preferred immediately preverbal position, both of which are shown to correlate with the notion of focus.  The research and analyses are based on a corpus of field data collected over three years in Nepal, including the Questionnaire on Information Structure (Skopeteas et al. 2006).  The paper is intended as a partner for and precursor to Archer (under review), which questions the notion of focus as a category and subsequently reanalyses the data presented here.

Thebo is a small Tibetan dialect spoken at the border of Sichuan and Gansu Provinces, China. The morphosyntactic structures that express egophoricity and evidentiality in Thebo Tibetan differ from those of other Tibetan dialects in that they involve both dedicated markers and stem alternations. This work examines how egophoricity and evidentiality are realised in Thebo using first-hand fieldwork from the variety spoken in Gyi.ba Town. It presents both synchronic and diachronic analyses, and considers how the distribution of egophoricity markers reflects the grammaticalization of these categories.