Limbu nous autres and First Person morphology

Description

Person and evidence in Himalayan languages. Special Issue of Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, Balthasar Bickel (ed.), Volume II: 24.1, 2001. - 10 p.In a number of Eastern Kiranti languages, verb forms for 1st person patient scenarios have been replaced, in some cases optionally, by a construction in which a word for man represents the 1st person patient, and the verb form lacks the usual 1st person markers to index the object. This micro-areal phenomenon has been described by Ebert (1991:86-88; 1994:28-29) and named impersonal 1st person patient marking. The precise extent of such marking, its integration into the verbal morphology, and the particular morphemes used vary from language to language. I will discuss this phenomenon in the Maiwa-Mewa Khola dialect, with reference to Limbu 1st person marking in general, including some evidence from the notes of Brian Hodgson (see accompanying article). In Limbu, two morphemes are used in this construction: yapmi and napmi. It is not entirely clear from the sources if these form a doublet in all dialects, but this appears to be the case in the dialect of the Maiwa and Mewa Khola valleys (MM) on which I did fieldwork in 1987-88; they will not be distinguished here. Their uses fall into two categories: (1) as an independent quasironoun meaning ‘a person, someone, someone else’, and (2) as a 1st person patient marker. I will begin with the first use, of which the second appears to be a grammaticalized extension.