Semantically empty grammatical heads

Table 13.2. Types of verb roots that have a vowel shift andor drop a root-final consonant in verbal inflection Lhomi verb root Root type Gloss Nonpast root Past root Imperative root ‘naa 1 ‘to put someone to bed’ ‘naa ‘naa ‘noo ʈøt 2 ‘to give’ ʈøt ʈet ʈøt tɕok 3 ‘to cut something’ tɕok tɕak tɕok phap 4 ‘to descend’ phap phap phop tok 5 ‘to pick something’ tok too too ɕuk 6 ‘to enter somewhere’ ɕuk ɕuu ɕuu phik 7 ‘to erase something’ phik phii phii ‘hek 8 ‘to burn something’ ‘hek ‘he ‘he phøt 9 ‘to invite someone’ phøt phø phø dʏt 10 ‘to gather something’ dʏt dʏ dʏ ok 11 ‘to dig up something’ ok oo oo tɕø 12 ‘to accompany someone’ tɕø tɕe tɕø ta 13 ‘to look at’ ta te tø ɕu 14 ‘to request something’ ɕu ɕʏ ɕʏ no 15 ‘to buy’ no nø nø ʈhi 16 ‘to enquire’ ʈhi ʈhii ʈhii tak 17 ‘to grind’ tak taa too When the verbal suffix begins with s, ts, t ɕ, k, p the root-final consonant t assimilates to it, e.g. ʈes-soŋ. A Lhomi verb root is a free morpheme and any of those roots in table 13.2 may occur without any affixation. Lhomi vowels e, ø and ʏ are always long in open syllables. There are some verb roots that show irregularity and do not fit into the table above. They are frequently occurring motion verbs or presentation verbs like sir ‘to say’, t ɕhit ‘do;VBZR’, dʑak ‘VBZR’, ɖo ‘go’ and ‘phin ‘go.come’ see also section 13.3.

13.2 Semantically empty grammatical heads

Lhomi has some semantically empty or almost empty heads which combine with hundreds of nouns to form a lexical verb. I call them verbalizers. A Lhomi verbalizer VBZR is the grammatical head of a verb phrase and it gets all the markings of the non-finite and finite verbs in a clause. A particular verbalizer is not limited to form just one or two types of verbs but often forms almost any type of verb. The most common verbalizers in Lhomi are d ʑak, tɕhit, and toŋ. The first one is absolutely void of any lexical content. The second one has occasionally the sense ‘to do’ or ‘to make’ or ‘to say’. The third one with certain nouns has the sense ‘to send’ but normally it also gets its lexical content from the noun it combines with. In other words it is the lexical verb noun+verbalizer which needs to be filed in Lhomi lexicon, not just the verbalizer, e.g. d ʑak. Morphosyntactic markings determine if the preceding nounNP is a predicate nominal or a noun argument. These three verbalizers are productive in the sense that when a noun is borrowed from English or Nepali and the need arises to have a verb, they may be used, e.g. phon toŋ ‘to make a phone call’, phor t ɕhit ‘to cast a vote in election’. Consider the following examples. 13 .1 ŋ-e ʈe-la tsha dʑap-en. BT 1SG-ERG rice-DAT salt VBZR-1PST ‘I exchanged salt for rice.’ 13 .2 ŋ-e tɕe dʑap-en. T1 1SG-ERG swimming VBZR-1PST ‘I swam.’ This is a control activity verb. 13.3 jak-la tsheppa d ʑak-ken bet. T2 yak-DAT heat VBZR-NMLZ;CONJ AUX ‘A yak feels hot.’ This is a generic statement about yaks at low altitude. 13.4 u-ki mi u- pa ma di=raŋ that-GEN man that-PL2 CONTR1 DEF=FOC khan ʈa-la ak guwa mit-tɕhik-ken bet. ST1 what-DAT INCLN happiness NEG-do;VBZR-NMLZ;CONJ AUX ‘Those men actually do not show any happiness on anything.’ In this illustration guwa is the predicate nominal. 13.5 pap-e ŋa-la phon taŋ-tɕuŋ. BT father-ERG 1SG-DAT phone send;VBZR-PST.EXP ‘Dad called me by phone.’ Lit: ‘Dad sent a phone call to me.’ 13 .6 domaŋ-la raŋ-ki gomtɕoŋ taŋ-soŋ. BT rel.book-DAT 2SG-ERG defilement.leap send;VBZR-PST.VIS ‘You leaped over the domang book and defiled it.’ 13.7 r ʏk-ki tɕøn taŋ-soŋ. BT landslide-INS damage send;VBZR-PST.VIS ‘The landslide caused damage.’ Most verbs with this verbalizer toŋ are BT or T verbs. Example 13.8 shows that occasionally it produces other types of verbs too. 13.8 nam- saŋ toŋ-kuk. Ambient CL sky-good send;VBZR-PROG;VIS ‘It is a sunny day.’ There is no nominal argument at all; ‘sky-good’ is the nominal predicate.

13.3 Irregular verbs