This article demonstrates prefix permutability in Chintang (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal) that is not constrained by any semantic or morphosyntactic structure, or by any dialect, sociolect, or idiolect choice—a phenomenon ruled out by standard assumptions about grammatical words. The prefixes are fully fledged parts of grammatical words and are different from clitics on a large number of standard criteria. The analysis of phonological word domains suggests that prefix permutability is a side-effect of prosodic subcategorization: prefixes occur in variable orders because each prefix and each stem element project a phonological word of their own, and each such word can host a prefix, at any position
A B S T R A C TAnalyzing the development of the noun-to-verb ratio in a longitudinal corpus of four Chintang (Sino-Tibetan) children, we find that up to about age four, children have a significantly higher ratio than adults. Previous cross-linguistic research rules out an explanation of this in[*] This research was made by possible by Grant Nos. BI 799/1-2 and II/81 961 from the Volkswagen Foundation (DoBeS program). Author contributions : Stoll designed the study; Bickel performed the data extraction and statistical analysis; Stoll, Bickel and Lieven wrote the paper ; all authors contributed to the development of the corpus. We warmly thank the children and families in taking part in this study. We are grateful to our Chintang assistants for their work on transcription and translation and our student assistants in Leipzig for their work on glossing and tagging the data. The data reported in this work are deposited and available on request at the DoBeS archive . All data extraction analysis was performed using R (R Development Core Team, 2010), with the additional packages lattice (Sarkar, 2010) and gam (Hastie, 2010).
pi-mayaŋ=kha. give-PASS.PTCP=COP 'Money was given (to him/her/someone ⁸)'. c. Joge J.[-NOM] pi-mayaŋ=kha. give-PASS.PTCP=COP 'Joge was given it/something'. ⁷ e verb orrefers to a ballistic motion of a T argument towards a G argument, including a successful impact on G; English translations need to vary between 'throw' and 'hit'. ⁸ Note that dropped pronouns can have any kind of reference, including indefinite reference, in these languages. us, a sentence like khade '[3sS-]go-PST' can mean 'someone went' or 's/he went'. Pronouns are not very frequent in actual discourse (see Biel 2003b).
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