Karbi is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken by half a million people in the Karbi Anglong district in Assam, Northeast India, and surrounding areas in the extended Brahmaputra Valley area. It is an agglutinating, verb-final language. This dissertation offers a description of the dialect spoken in the hills of the Karbi Anglong district. It is primarily based on a corpus that was created during a total of fifteen months of original fieldwork, while building on and expanding on research reported by Grüßner in 1978. While the exact phylogenetic status of Karbi inside TB has remained controversial, this dissertation points out various putative links to other TB languages. The most intriguing aspect of Karbi phonology is the tone system, which carries a low functional load. While three tones can be contrasted on monosyllabic roots, the rich agglutinating morphology of Karbi allows the formation of polysyllabic words, at which level tones lose most of their phonemicity, while still leaving systematic phonetic traces. Nouns and verbs represent the two major word classes of Karbi at the root level; property-concept terms represent a subclass of verbs. At the heart of Karbi morphosyntax, there are two prefixes of Proto-TB provenance that have diachronically shaped the grammar of the language: the possessive prefix a- and the nominalizer ke-. Possessive a- attaches to nouns that are modified by preposed elements and represents the most frequent morpheme in the corpus. Nominalization involving ke- forms the basis for a variety of predicate constructions, including most of Karbi subordination as well as a number of main clause constructions. In addition to nominalization, subordination commonly involves clause chaining. Noun phrases may be marked for their clausal role via -phān `non-subject' or -lòng `locative' but frequently remain unmarked for role. Their pragmatic status can be indicated with information structure markers for topic, focus, and additivity. Commonly used discourse constructions include elaborate expressions and parallelism more generally, general extenders, copy verb constructions, as well as a number of final particles. Audio files are available of the texts given in the appendices, particular examples illustrating phonological issues, and phonetic recordings of tone minimal sets. Supplemental files are located at: https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/13657

Cette thèse propose une analyse approfondie de la dynamique des changements observés au sein d’une communauté de chasseurs-cueilleurs, les Baka du Gabon. Ce groupe se compose de moins de 1000 individus et parle une langue oubanguienne dans un environnement bantuphone. Une comparaison avec les autres langues du même sous-groupe linguistique met en évidence les spécificités du baka et met au jour des affinités entre cette langue et le monzombo. Ces deux groupes ethnolinguistiques semblent avoir entretenu des relations qui s’inscrivent dans une dynamique d’échange de compétences (chasse-cueillette vs pêche-maîtrise du fer). Ce type de complémentarité se retrouve dans les relations entre les Baka et leurs voisins bantu actuels, dont en particulier les Fang, pour ce qui concerne le Gabon.Le mode de vie des Baka demeure, encore aujourd’hui, largement marqué par la mobilité et la forêt. Toutefois, la sédentarisation imposée par voie gouvernementale, la contigüité avec les Fang de même que l’influence croissante de la mondialisation entraînent des transformations par rapport auxquelles les Baka cherchent à se positionner. Ces dernières touchent la langue (système et utilisation) de même que bon nombre de pratiques socioculturelles (habitat, mobilité, alimentation, subsistance, religion, etc.).La thèse s’efforce d’identifier ces transformations, de les décrire et d’en évaluer l’impact en tenant compte de la diversité des situations. Elle comporte, par ailleurs, une réflexion critique des principes de catégorisation fondée sur l’étude de plusieurs domaines lexicaux (faune, flore, maladie). Certains changements peuvent apparaître en surface sans pour autant remettre en cause, de manière fondamentale, leur attachement à la forêt et à certaines valeurs ancestrales. Toutefois, les différentes pressions exogènes (i.a. sédentarisation, mondialisation) et endogènes (i.a. attitude des individus, transmission) qui déterminent alors le degré d’avancement des différentes transformations, ne doivent pas être sous évaluées en tant qu’elles sont une menace pesant sur la langue, la connaissance de la flore et de la faune et certaines pratiques socioculturelles. / This thesis proposes a detailed analysis on the dynamic of change observed among the Baka from Gabon, a hunter-gatherer community. This group is composed of less than 1000 individuals speaking an Ubangian language inside a Bantu environment. By comparing their language with others from the same linguistic sub-group, some singularities from Baka and some resemblance with the Monzombo sub-group can be seen. These two ethnolinguistic groups, Baka and Monzombo groups, seem to have kept close contact based on skill exchanges (hunting/gathering and fishing/iron skills). This interaction is witnessed in the exchanges the Baka population preserves with their current Bantu neighbors, especially with Fang in Gabon.Nowadays, the Baka way of life is still characterized by their mobility and the forest. Nevertheless, due to a non-migratory lifestyle imposed by the State, the proximity with the Fang group and the growing globalization, dramatic changes are inflicted to the Baka community. Changes at which they are trying to adapt. These constraints do not affect only their language (system and use) but also many sociocultural habits such as settlement, mobility, food and means of support or religion.The aim of this thesis is to identify these ongoing transformations, to describe and to evaluate their impact bearing in mind the singularity of many contexts. An argumentative reflection on categorization principles is also proposed on lexical domains such as fauna, flora and diseases. Certain changes could arise without necessarily questioning their bonds to the forest and ancestral values. Nonetheless, both exogenous (globalization and a sedentary life) and endogenous pressures (individual behavior and culture transmission) determining the progress of different transformations should not be under evaluated as being a threat to the language, to the knowledge of the flora and fauna and to certain sociocultural practices.