Word formation in contemporary Liangmai: A morphological study

Kailadbou Daimai
2020 Himalayan Linguistics  
This paper attempts to discuss the different processes of word formation in contemporary Liangmai, a Tibeto-Burman language of the Kuki-Chin-Naga sub group (Bradley 1997) . According to Census of India, 2011, the language is spoken by 49469 speakers in the state of Manipur and Nagaland, in the northeastern part of India. This paper discusses a detailed description of the word formation processes that are relevant in Liangmai, namely affixation, compounding and reduplication. Affixation consists
more » ... of prefixing and suffixing. Infixing is not found in the language. The process of compounding is used extensively in word formation in Liangmai. Compound words in Liangmai can be categorized according to the semantic criteria into endocentric and exocentric compounds. The resultant compounds in the language are almost exclusively nominal. Reduplication is also a common word formation process in the language. Both complete and partial reduplication are used and reduplicated words indicate concepts like distributive, exclusive, plurality, etc. Like other TB languages of the region, Liangmai is an agglutinative language.
doi:10.5070/h918234471 fatcat:dcxgx2xy6bbylio2eusxnnvnp4