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Stephen Morey

Constituent order change in the Tai languages of Assam

Keywords: adposition, Ahom, discourse, focus, Khamti, linguistic area, Phake, Tai, topicalization, word order, word order change

The Tai languages of Assam (India), among them Tai Khamti, are characterised by AVO/SV constituent order, conditioned by a complex interplay of pragmatics, particularly focus structure. Greenberg considered Tai Khamti, a postpositional language, an exception to his Universal 4 (whereby “SOV” languages are postpositional), but this article demonstrates that it is not an exception. Older Tai languages, such as Ahom, had VO structure. However, modern Khamti and Phake exhibit both VO and OV, depending on the pragmatic structure of the clause. This change is partly due to marking animate O arguments in adpositional phrases, so that constituent order is not required for disambiguation, and partly due to contact with verb-final languages that dominate the Northeast India linguistic area.

Linguistic Typology, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 1430-0532
Volume: 10, 12/2006
Pages: 327 - 367

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