A Grammar of Western Tamang
Dan Raj Regmi & Ambika Regmi
Tribhuvan University
This grammar examines major communicative coding devices (viz., sensory-motor code and the grammatical code) in Western Tamang and compares them with those coding devices in Eastern Tamang from typological perspective.
Western Tamang employs thirty-five basic consonants and eleven vowels including four phonetic pitches of the tones to code 'words' at conceptual lexicon. It utilizes morphology, intonation and word order as primary grammar-coding devices to primarily code atomic propositional information. It employs other grammatical sub-systems to mainly code discourse-pragmatics.
Western Tamang, a complex tonal language, displays somewhat consistently ergative casemarking system. However, human patients are marked by dative case suffix. Except negation, all case-role and tense-aspect and modality markers are cliticized as suffixes. Order of clausal constituents may show a discrepancy mainly for pragmatic effects. Western Tamang lacks agreement and massively employs nominalization for many syntactic functions. The relative clauses are formed with the nominalized verbs followed by the genitive suffix in Western Tamang. Interestingly, it exhibits non-promotional type of passive constructions and makes use of conjunction and subordination to maintain coherence across the clauses.
Dr. Dan Raj Regmi, is Professor and former Head, Central Department of Linguistics, Tribhuvan University, Nepal. Dr. Ambika Regmi, is senior researcher in Linguistic Survey of Nepal (LinSuN), Central Department of Linguistics, Tribhuvan University, Nepal.
ISBN 9783862888832. Languages of the World/Materials 511. 160pp. 2018.
