Structure of Subordinate Clauses in Mizo

Description

The book presents a linguistic description of subordinate clauses in Mizo. It describes syntactic structures and grammatical properties of embedded clauses in Mizo. Mizo is a Tibeto-Burman language of the Kuki-Chin group spoken in the state of Mizoram, north-east of India. Apart from Mizoram, the Mizo speakers are also settled in the adjoining hill states of Manipur and Tripura as well as along with the border areas of Burma and Bangladesh. The embedded clauses in Mizo precede the matrix clause and has both finite and non-finite complement clauses. It has externally as well as internally headed relative clauses with all the three head positions. Relative clauses reflect the model of cleft constructions in which the clause, instead of serving as a DP modifier is employed as a predicate over a focal element cross-linguistically. Mizo clefts are copula sentences where the copula has a complex DP in its specifier position and the derivation of complex DP remains the same. The cleft phrase is brought into focus by attaching a copula ni next to it. Passives in Mizo are basically a focusing operation where DO or IO gets promoted to a [+Foc] position, marked with the Focus marker-cu and fronted to clause initial position and the rest of the sentence remains unchanged. Mizo has two adverbial subordinating morphemes -ah and -in. They combine with different stems to form subordinating conjunctions such as hun-ah, ciah-in, cuan to mark the clause boundary and serve as a linking device to link the subordinate clause to the matrix clause. The syntactic structures of Mizo subordinate clauses are fascinating and of great interest to linguists and scholars with language structures and functions.

Om Prakash is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics, School of Humanities, North-Eastern Hills University, Shillong. He teaches courses in the areas of Historical Linguistics, Syntactic Typology, Sociolinguistics, and Applied Linguistics [ELT].