LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:11 November 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Agreements in Manipuri

S. Indrakumar Singh

Abstract

The present paper is concerned with the Grammatical Agreements in Manipuri, a Tibeto-Burman language. This paper analyses three features such as Number, Person, and Gender, whether they show agreement features. Number is relevant for certain lexemes such as nouns, adjectives, pronouns and verbs. Manipuri has no grammatical agreement in number. Singular is overtly unmarked while plural is marked by the suffixes, -siN (added to all other nouns) or -kHoi (added to personal pronouns and proper nouns indicating humans; not state or country) and other lexical quantifiers. There is no person agreement phenomenon between the verb and its argument in Manipuri. Three pronominal prefixes are distinct in Manipuri such as, 1st person pronominal ‘i’, 2nd person pronominal ‘n«’ and 3rd person pronominal ‘m«’. Manipuri has no grammatical gender. It has ways of identifying natural genders.

1. Introduction

Agreement is a traditional term used in grammatical theory and description to refer to a formal relationship between elements, whereby a form of one word requires a corresponding form of another (David Crystal, 1985). Grammatical agreement is present in many of the world’s languages today and has become an essential feature that guides linguistic processing. When two words in a sentence are said to ‘agree’, this means that they share certain features such as ‘gender’, ‘number’, ‘person’, or others.

Learning a language requires mastering its means to indicate constituent structure, that is, how words are linked together in bigger units such as phrases. Many languages do this by relying on so-called grammatical agreement. This means that information of a single linguistic unit (source) can reappear on another unit (target). That is to say that grammatical information is percolated from source to target (Corbett, 2006). The information that is percolated is usually packaged in terms of agreement features.

Agreement features are elements into which linguistic units, such as words, can be broken down. Commonly used features are number (e.g. singular, plural, dual), person (e.g. 1st, 2nd, 3rd), and gender (e.g. masculine, feminine, neuter). Less clear features include definiteness and case (Corbett, 2006). In Manipuri, three features, namely, Number, Person, Gender can be discussed whether they show agreement feature.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

S. Indrakumar Singh
Department of Linguistics
Manipur University
Imphal
Manipur
India
iksagol@gmail.com
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