Tangut verb agreement

Abstract

The Tangut language is of particular importance to the field of Sino­Tibetan Studies, notably because of its morphological conservatism, which is unexpectedly correlated with a simplification of its syllable structure, a consequence of a process Miyake (2012) called “compression”. Such conservatism is evident in the syllable qualities reconstructed, which sometimes reflect proto­ Tangut’s ancient derivational processes. Verbs also exhibit various flectional phenomena, mainly due to conversion of agreement rules and referential hierarchy rules (Silverstein 1976), in a manner reminiscent of the indexation system of languages of the rGyalrongic taxon within the Qiangic family. The present paper attempts to explain the absence of indexation in the Tangut verb, a key phenomenon in the history of verb agreement analysis. First, I recall the main rules of the Tangut verb’s agreement system, as shown by Kepping (1975) and Gong (2001). Second, cases of non­agreement are analyzed. Apart from the case of non­local contexts, we see that the absence of agreement occurs in non­finite forms resulting from a dependency pattern, such as clause chaining, topic/comment context, and semantically dependent modality.1