The origins of postverbal negation in Kuki-Chin

Abstract

Tibeto-Burman languages in and around North East India tend to show innovative negation constructions. Most other languages in the family retain the negative prefix *ma- which is reconstructed for Proto-Tibeto-Burman, but in North East India the negative morpheme is usually post-verbal. In the Kuki-Chin languages we see several innovative negators: *mak, *law, #kay, and *no, all occurring following the lexical verb. The ngeator *mak appears to reflect an old auxiliary negated with the original prefix. The other forms all represent recent grammaticalizations of negative existentials or other semantically negative lexical verbs.