18. Flexible valency in Chintang

A grammar of Yakkha

“…Stems ending in a nasal and the augment -s, as they are, e.g., known in Chintang and Belhare (Schikowski 2012;Bickel 1997a) The roots of group (iii) have the structure /CV-r/, originating in *CV-t roots (cf. Table 8.6).…”

“…10 Due to morphophonological processes such as vowel elision to avoid hiatus, some morphemes undergo changes or are rarely overtly realized. Example (6) also illustrates a further morphophonological process in Yakkha and many other Kiranti languages, known as suffix copying or nasal copying (Bickel 2003;Doornenbal 2009;Ebert 2003c;Schikowski 2012). Nasal suffixes in Yakkha can be copied regressively and thus may appear up to three times in one suffix string (see §3.5.7.2).…”

“…The only Kiranti language with a similar marker is Belhare, but there, the marker partly has nsg and 3>2 distribution (Bickel 2003: 551). 15 The prefix domain is surprisingly compact in Yakkha, compared to most of the surrounding languages: Limbu has four prefixes (van Driem 1997), Belhare has five prefixes (Bickel 2003), Chintang has eight prefixes (Schikowski 2012) and Bantawa has six (Doornenbal 2009). In this respect, Yakkha resembles its northern neighbors Yamphu and Kulung (Rutgers 1998;Tolsma 1999) and many Western Kiranti languages (Jacques 2012a: 93).…”

“…The verb is, however, inflected with intransitive morphology (triggered by the semantic A argument, the learner), thus behaving like the verb in (1a) with respect to person marking. 6 The same notational convention is employed, e.g., in Schikowski, Bickel & Paudyal (2015 …”