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Agreement system in Chiru
Abstract
Chiru is a Northwestern Kuki-Chin language spoken in twelve villages in Manipur and one village in Assam, Northeast India. The language displays verb stem alternation. Person marking occurs either with prefixes or suffixes. For prefixes, there are two sets with a very slight difference: Either the first person prefixes include a vowel that copies the vowel of the following root or they include the vowel /a/. Otherwise, both sets have a second person prefix that always remains /a/, and a third person prefix that always has the copy vowel. This difference in person markers surfaces in the distinction between intransitive S marking vs. transitive A marking. The object is marked by a single prefix nV- that indexes any speech act participant.