Second person verb forms in Tibeto-Burman

Abstract

Since the beginning of research on the PTB verb agreement, 2nd person marking has posed a persistent problem. Every scholar who has dealt with the problem reconstructs a set of person/number suffixes including 2sg #-n(a). But there is also strong evidence for a #t- prefix which also indexes 2nd person. My purpose in this paper is to summarize the results of a number of descriptions and analyses which have appeared over the last decade or so, which provide new evidence concerning the #t- prefix, and resolve some of the problems which had previously impeded our understanding of this form. I will show that there were two distinct verb forms used for 2nd person reference in PTB. In the final section of the paper I will speculate about the implications of this fact.