Ebook: A Grammar of Atong

Publication date: 2008
Number of pages: 760This thesis is a grammar of Atong, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the South Garo Hills district of Meghalaya State in Northeast India. The grammar is based primarily on data collected during a total of twelve months of fieldwork, spread out over two trips, between 2005 and 2007, in the villages of Badri Maidugytym and Siju. I will summarise a few important typological features of the language. Atong is an analytic and mildly polysynthetic language with suffixes and phrasal and clausal
enclitics. There are no prefixes or proclitics. Several phrasal enclitics can also function as clausal enclitics. Constituent order in a clause is pragmatically determined. Atong makes extensive use of zero anaphora, i.e. referents that are retrievable from the context (co-textual as well as real-world context) are usually omitted; no NP has to be obligatorily expressed in any clause. Semantic role marking of NPs is determined by different pragmatic and lexical factors. Clauses with multiple unmarked NPs are common and their semantic role has to be inferred from the context. Boundaries between word classes in Atong can be fuzzy, as not only verbs, but also nouns and members of several other word classes can function as predicate head.