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Published: 2018

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ISBN-13: 9781922185419

This is the eighth volume of North East Indian Linguistics, a series of volumes for publishing current research on the languages of North East India, the first volume of which was published in 2008. The papers in this volume were presented at the 9th conference of the North East Indian Linguistics Society (NEILS), held at Tezpur University in February 2016. The papers for this anniversary volume are arranged into five sections, commencing with two field reports on Mnar, a Khasian language, and Liangmai, a "Naga" language of the Zeme group. The second section of the volume presents detailed work on three languages spoken in Arunachal Pradesh, including on the phonology of Hrusso Aka, colour terms in the Tangsa languages of Changlang district, and a sociolinguistic study of language attitudes in a group of Nocte people who have shifted from their ancestral villages to Bordumsa town. The third section explores the morphosyntax of languages in the family now known both by its older name - Sino-Tibetan - and the more recently coined Trans-Himalayan, with papers investigating the grammars of the Kuki-Chin languages of the 'Naga Belt', and Bodo and Dimasa of the Bodo-Garo group of languages. An exciting feature of the 9th NEILS conference was the number of papers on the topic of person indexation (agreement) on verbs, and the fourth section of this volume presents detailed analyses of this topic in a range of languages, particularly from Northern Naga and Kuki-Chin. The final section of the volume covers the study of Assamese, the major language of the area that is an Indo-European language with a long written history. Papers in this section encompass a wide range of topics, including dictionary making, classifiers and quantifiers - an area of syntax that is special to the Eastern Indic area, and language attitudes and changing linguistic forms in the speech of younger Assamese speakers.