Himalayan Linguistics

The current paper is an attempt at a study of the grammar and meaning of atemporal complement clauses in Assamese from a Cognitive linguistics point of view. Assamese is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Assam, a northeastern province of India. It is the native tongue of the Assamese and is currently spoken by more than twenty million people both as a native tongue and as a link language in the northeastern India.

Grammar, in Cognitive linguistics, is not independent of meaning, rather any grammatical form is motivated by its underlying semantics, i.e. how the event or the situation is construed by the speaker. Thus, depending on the construal involved, clausal complementation takes different grammatical forms. One type of clausal complementation is atemporal complementation, traditionally called non-finite complementation. One core dimension that the construal of atemporal complementation is based on is atemporalization, which involves a conceptual shift from the relational concept (as encoded typically by a verb) to a thing or object (as encoded typically by a noun) having an ontological existence, which is often called reification. Thus, the verb in the atemporal complement clause is realized in the non-finite form, i.e. it is left ungrounded in time. This in turn also means that typically the situation expressed by the complement clause involves what is called summary scanning in cognitive linguistics. Atemporal complementization also may involve another dimension of construal, i.e. the principle of Figure and Ground.

The present paper identifies the atemporal complementizers in Assamese and their grammar and meaning. Assamese has at least five such complementizers and accordingly the language has at least five different types of atemporal complement clauses with their own semantics. In describing these atemporal complement clauses, the paper also shows that although atemporal they may not fully cancel out sequential scanning. This supports the view that that the distinction between summary and sequential scanning are not mutually exclusive as is claimed in Langacker (2008).

The data for this paper has mainly come from the authors themselves who happen to be native speakers of Assamese.