A Grammar of Koyee
Tara Mani Rai
Tribhuvan University
This grammar attempts to analyze the forms and functions of different grammatical categories in Koyee at both the sentence and discourse levels and compare them with other Tibeto-Burman languages from the typological perspective.
There are 12 oral vowels and 26 consonants in the Koyee language. Gender is not grammatical in this language. It exhibits three categories of numbers: singular, dual, and plural. It is a morphologically split ergative language. The nominals in Koyee are inflected for a number of cases which are marked in two ways: case clitics, and postpositions. Mostly the adjectives in Koyee are derived from verbs, nouns, and copulas. A number of adjectives in Koyee are borrowed from Nepali.
Since Koyee is one of the agglutinating languages, number, person, tense and aspect in the Koyee are overtly realized in the affixation. There are various types of verbs like verbs 'to be', benefactive verb, reflexive, reciprocal verbs, existential, identical and motion verbs. Tense, aspect, modality and mood in Koyee tend to appear as the complex category. Tense, aspect and modality interact intensively in Koyee. There are eight types of basic clauses in the language.
Dr. Tara Mani Rai is an assistant professor at Central Department of Linguistics, Tribhuvan University, Nepal.
ISBN 9783969391129 (Hardcover). LINCOM Studies in Asian Linguistics 97. 298pp. 2022.