Profile

I study Tibeto-Burman languages and am currently writing a descriptive grammar of Karbi as my PhD dissertation with Scott DeLancey as my advisor. Karbi is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by about half a million people in Northeast India. The phylogenetic status of Karbi inside Tibeto-Burman is currently still unclear, but the hypothesis of a closer link to the Kuki-Chin branch appears particularly promising. Before modern contact with Assamese (Indo-Aryan), the Austroasiatic Khasi languages to the west of the Karbi-speaking area have had a major influence on the evolution of Karbi grammar. The Karbi descriptive grammar project is a collaboration with, and was initiated by, the Karbi Lammet Amei, a Karbi language and literature organization.My main interests are historical linguistics, morphosyntax, discourse pragmatics, and semantics. Specific research projects on Karbi grammar include 1) diachronic nominalization in focus and imperfective constructions; 2) the different functions of the additive clitic; 3) realis and irrealis categories; 4) the link between cislocative, non-subject speech-act participant marking, and the second person pronoun; 5) benefactive, malefactive, affectedness; 6) the syntax and semantics of negation.The topic of my M.A. thesis was comparative Tibeto-Burman nominalization. It offers a discussion of apparently cognate nominalizing velar prefixes and the various syn- and diachronic constructions they occur in. These nominalizing velar prefixes occur in a number of Tibeto-Burman languages across different branches of the family.My papers can be downloaded here.