Tense, Aspect and Modality (Tam) in the Magar Dhut
Date
2013
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Department of Linguistics
Abstract
This study presents a linguistic description of the Magar Dhut, a Tibeto-Burman,
Central-Himalayish language belonging to Sino-Tibetan language family, spoken
mainly in Nawalparasi district, within the functional-typological framework mainly
developed by Talmy Givón (2001) and further supplemented by Noonan (2003), Bhat
(2004), Dryer (2006), Dixon (2010) and DeLancey (2012).
This is field-based linguistic study. This study mainly focused on the tense, aspect and
modality system of the Magar Dhut. The main goal of the study is to analyze the form
and functions of tense, aspect and modality at the sentence and discourse level. This
study, organized into six chapters, presents the binary tense distinction: past and nonpast
in the language. This language presents both inherent and grammatical aspects.
Magar Dhut exhibits four types of inherent aspects: compact, accomplishment,
activity and stative. There are two grammatical aspects: perfective and imperfective.
Within perfective, it exhibits perfect, past perfective and non-past perfective aspects.
There are four types of imperfective aspect: progressive, durative, habitual and
prospective. Six types of mood are found in Magar namely indicative, imperative,
interrogative, optative, subjunctive and hortative. The language presents both
epistemic and evaluative (deontic) modalities. Within epistemic modality, it exhibits
probability, certainty, negation and mirativity. Evaluative modality exhibits
desirability, ability and obligation.
Thus, Magar Dhut is an aspect prominent language.
Description
Keywords
Magar dhut, Encoding system