The shapes of verbal paradigms in Kiranti languages

Abstract

The Kiranti languages of Eastern Nepal have polypersonal indexation, with two arguments encoded in verb agreement markers. In contemporary descriptions of Kiranti languages (from 1975 on), the tables presenting transitive verb paradigms are arranged according to the same layout, in a matrix format with the different person/number combinations for the agent argument represented in the vertical axis and the patient argument person/number combinations in the horizontal axis. In earlier grammars, however, a number of different formats for representing the combination of two arguments was used. In this article, I shall present the different paradigm formats found in a sampling of grammars of Kiranti languages from 1857 to the present day, with a view to tracing the origins of the current layout, and, in cases where significantly different layouts are encountered, attempting to retrace the model which may have influenced the presentation of the data