Himalayan Linguistics

This contribution describes caritive expressions in Suansu, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Manipur, North-East India. Two distinct morphosyntactic caritive constructions can be identified in Suansu: the first, semantically restricted to human absentees, involves the comitative particle ʈʂidə and the negated main verb. The other strategy, more prominent and found in all semantic contexts, consists of a biclausal construction with a negated ancillary clause embedded in the main one. The types of verbs -and their specificity- used in the ancillary clause vary depending on the functions and meanings of the absentee. However, the use of the verb thõn ‘to be inside’ in the ancillary caritive clause appears to be predominant and extends to unexpected semantic contexts, signaling a possible grammaticalization process of this verb in caritive expressions.