Thulung Rai is an endangered Tibeto-Burman language of eastern Nepal, currently<br />spoken by approximately one thousand people. It is a member of the Kiranti group in the<br />Himalayish branch of Tibeto-Burman, along with languages characterized principally by their<br />complex pronominalizing verbal inflectional systems.<br />This dissertation provides an overview of the grammar of the Thulung language, along<br />with selected texts and a glossary. The aspects of the grammar which are discussed are those<br />which are particularly relevant as far as Thulungs heritage as a Tibeto-Burman language is<br />concerned. The chapters discuss the phonological system of the language; the case marking<br />system; the use of discourse particles; nominalization and its etymological and semantic<br />relationship with relativization and genitivization; the finite verbs, with their complex agreement<br />system and stem alternations; the augmentation of verbs with aspect-bearing derivational<br />suffixes; clause-combining by means of converbs and sequencers.<br />Each of these topics bears a significance to Tibeto-Burman studies as a whole, and these<br />are characteristic features of languages from this area. The areal context for Thulung is another<br />important aspect of this dissertation. The endangered status of Thulung is a result of the inroads<br />of the Indo-Aryan national language of Nepal, Nepali. Each chapter, in addition to describing<br />and analyzing particular grammatical topics, also discusses the equivalent constructions in Nepali<br />in light of whether they constitute the source for the construction in Thulung as it stands today.<br />The contributions of this dissertation are in providing reliable and up-to-date information<br />on a little-known minority Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal. This is an important addition to<br />the field of Himalayan languages and will be useful for efforts towards reconstructing the<br />development of Tibeto-Burman languages in the Himalayas. An important dimension of this<br />dissertation is that it looks at grammatical features in one language in the context of their<br />distribution over the linguistic area, even across language family boundaries. In this way, the<br />materials presented are useful as another case-study of an intense language contact situation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:CCSD/oai:tel.archives-ouvertes.fr:halshs-00004761 |
| Date | January 2002 |
| Creators | Lahaussois, Aimee |
| Source Sets | CCSD theses-EN-ligne, France |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | PhD thesis |
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