Referential Hierarchy Effects in Yakkha Three-Participant Constructions

Abstract

Yakkha (Kiranti language family, Nepal) has several constructions where speech act participants (SAP) and third persons are not treated alike. Such effects are found in the treatment of agents and patients of two-participant constructions, but also in the treatment of theme and goal arguments of three-participant constructions. This paper explores the referentiality effects on case marking and verbal agreement of theme and goal arguments. Crucially, most effects are scenario-based, i.e. they are conditioned not only by the properties of one argument, but by the relation between theme and goal. Besides the distinction between SAP and third person, the animacy of arguments can play a role, so that the argument realization in one construction is often conditioned by an interplay of several factors. Apart from alternations in case and agreement, Yakkha exhibits a serialization pattern that is related to an atypically high animacy of theme arguments. After analyzing these alternations and their conditions, the paper discusses how the findings match predictions that have been made about argument realization in threeparticipant constructions. German Academic Exchange Service DAAD (2011). It is due to the EUROBabel project Referential Hierarchies in Morphosyntax (RHIM) and the questionnaire on three-argument constructions designed by Anna Siewierska and Eva van Lier that I started investigating referentiality effects in three-argument verbs in Yakkha systematically. I would like to thank Eva van Lier, Françoise Rose, an anonymous reviewer and Lennart Bierkandt for their helpful comments on an earlier version. My deepest gratitude goes to the members of the the Yakkha community, without whom my research would simply not be possible:

A grammar of Yakkha

“…A chapter in the Linguistic Survey of India provides a brief introduction and some Yakkha texts that were collected with Yakkha speakers who had migrated to Darjeeling (Grierson 1909: 305-315). 11 More recent works on the language are a glossary (Winter et al 1996), a YakkhaNepali-English dictionary (Kongren 2007b), two articles about the inflectional morphology, both based on the same verbal paradigm collected by Gvozdanović (Gvozdanović 1987; van Driem 1994) and an article by myself on three-argument constructions (Schackow 2012b).…”

Medicinal ethnobotany of the Yakkha community in eastern Nepal

“…Yakkha is an underrepresented ethnic group residing in the hills of Sankhuwasabha district in eastern Nepal (NFDIN 2003). The villages along the border of Sankhuwasabha and Dhankuta district at an elevation of 1000-2000 m above sea level (m) are the main settlement areas of Yakkha (Schackow 2012). With gradually decreasing population of merely 17,460 (CBS 2011, CBS 2021) and confined to the mid-hills of eastern Nepal, Yakkha is a distinct Tibeto-Burman ethnic group of Kirati religion.…”

“…Some educated individuals maintain both agriculture and other professions. Historically, recruitment in the British Gorkha army provided income, and in recent years, labor migration to Arab countries and Asian nations has become a crucial source of support for Yakkha households (Schackow 2012). According to CBS (2021), the population of Yakkha in Sankhuwasabha district is 5,752 of which 4,889 people speak Yakkha language as their mother tongue with an additional 234 people preferring Yakkha language as their second language.…”

“…As an ethnic group, the Yakkha has been mentioned by many researchers (Bista 1980, Jimi et al 2009, Kongren 2007, Linkha 2010, Morris 1936, Russel 1992, Schackow 2012. Apart from anthropological aspects, only a few studies have focused on the medicinal ethnobotany of the Yakkha people.…”