Verb agreement suffixes in Mizo-Kuki-Chin

Abstract

Mizo-Kuki-Chin is a low-level branch of Tibeto-Bunnan, consisting of two or three dozen closely-related languages (the number will depend on what we choose to count as distinct languages). The branch is defined as a genetic unit by several phonological shifts (VanBik 2009) and important morpho syntactic innovations, in particular the grammaticalization of a morphophonemic alternation between two different stems of the verb, and the innovation of a paradigm of prefixal subject agreement on the verb. Some of the agreement prefixes resemble prefixes which occur in the mixed prefixal-suffixal verb paradigms of some Kiranti and rGyalrongic languages (DeLancey 1989, 20lla; van Driem 1993, 1997), and it is likely that the Mizo-Kuki-Chin (MKC) paradigm contains morphological material which has cognates elsewhere in TB. Nevertheless the MKC agreement paradigm is clearly a shared innovation which characterizes the MKC branch and sets it off from the rest of the family.