Research Abstract |
Kinnauri is one of the Tibeto-Burman languages in the westmost part of the Tibeto-Burman area, and it has not clear where Kinnauri belongs in Tibeto-Burman. Linguistic Survey of India, which was published at the beginning of the 20th century, includes the description of Kinnauri, but the amount of data and number of studies on Kinnauri are far away from enough. Though recently some papers have appeared, the field work on Kinnauri is significant yet. The purpose of this study is to describe and the Kinnauri language based on filed work. During the first two years of the period of the grant, I described the usage of the case markers of Kinnauri. The descrption of the case marking system will be helpful for the analysis of the morphosyntactic phenomena. As for the case marking system itself, it is interesting that the dative noun is used for the direct object in some cases. Though it is not now clear enough in which case the dative case is used, it seems to have something to do with the specificity of the nom. I have been interested in the verb morphology in Kinnauri, for example, the person suffixes for subject and object. Therefore, I surveyed specially on the verb morphology during the second part of the period. I pointed out that the person suffixes of Kinnauri are related to the deixis, in other words, that the speech act participants are put together in Kinnauri. The verb morphology of Kinnauri, however, is very complex, and it is necessary that much more data be collected. For example, the verb suffix -s is used for the reflexive and reciprocal meanings, and I introduced the usage of this suffix in the report of this grant-in-aid for scientific research. In the report, however, the suffix is just introduced, and the analysis is a problem to be solved after collecting much more data. As for the noun morphology, too, as collected data have increased, themes to be solved have been getting more and more.
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