Himalayan Linguistics

The South Central languages show two distinct indexation paradigms: a set of postverbal agreement words, incorporating person-number indexation and tense/aspect/polarity marking, inherited from a pre-SC ancestor, and a set of proclitic pronouns, otherwise used as possessive clitics on nouns. The interaction of the two series differs across the branch. Some Northern Peripheral have full competing paradigms, with the choice of one or the other marking register. At the other extreme, languages in the Central group use only the innovative proclitic paradigm, though it may incorporate pieces from the archaic postverbal paradigm. In most Northwestern and some Southern Peripheral languages the paradigms are associated with transitivity and/or polarity, with the proclitic paradigm found in affirmative transitive and the postverbal in negative intransitive clauses. We find great variation across the branch in the interaction of indexation with transitivity. Many languages have innovated object-indexation, a few have developed inverse markers and/or hierarchical indexation patterns.