Dumi Verb Morphology

Abstract

Dumi language, a Tibeto-Burman Group under the Sino-Tibetan Family is a pronominalized Kiranti language. It is one of the endangered languages of eastern Nepal, currently spoken by approximately two thousand and five hundred people. This thesis entitled 'Dumi Verb Morphology' attempts to describe and analyze the verbal system of Dumi language. From the different scholarly made linguistics reports show that the Dumi people are gradually losing their native language. So, it seems an urgent need to preserve and promote the language from the linguistics and literary point of view. This study has mainly three parts. The first part consists of the acknowledgement, abstract, content and list of abbreviations, figures, symbols and tables. The second part is the main body of the research which has been organized in the four chapters. The first chapter deals about the general background of Dumi people and language. The second chapter presents the outline of the Dumi phonology. The third chapter analyzes the Dumi Verb morphology. The fourth chapter draws the summary and conclusions of the whole work. In this language, the verb morphology of Dumi shows different inflectional and derivational processes. There is only existential 'be verb' in Dumi, which contrasts its form in past and non-past. In Dumi Prefixing 'ma-' negativizes the verbs. When identificational 'be verb' is negativized, the negative prefix 'ma-' is independently or lexically used as much as identificational 'be verb' does not exist in Dumi. The process of causativization is both morphological and lexical. The morphological causative suffix is productive. Every main verb can be made causative by adding suffix '-mu'. Dumi verbs can be said to possess an active, a passive and the passive is only apparent, which is being affected by adding different personal suffixes denoting the subject or the object. Adding a suffix 's' or 'si' and conjugating as usual form in the middle. In this study, different aspects of the verb morphology of Dumi language have been discussed Finally, the third part consists of three appendices. In sub-sections of appendix A: A , A 2 and A 3 , I have presented the verb paradigms of intransitive, transitive and reflexive verbs respectively. In appendix B, it is presented the three texts which have been interlinearized using the toolbox, computer software. Ultimately, there is Profile of the language consultants in the appendix C.