Word Order and the Grammaticalization of Gender in Khasian

Abstract

Verb-initial order is reported for less than 9% of the 1,377 languages in the WALS word order database (Dryer 2013). This makes such order somewhat unusual among languages of the world, and leads us to question how verb-initial order develops or is lost diachronically. Many of the Khasian varieties prefer verb-initial clauses, a feature they share with Nicobarese lects but not with the rest of the phylum (Munda is largely SOV and AA languages in MSEA are largely SVO in terms of the WALS typology; see Jenny et al. 2015); yet this fact has been hidden from scholarship until recently due to the dearth of information about the Khasian varieties. The current chapter describes the state of knowledge about word order within this group, with the perspective that Khasian word order has interesting implications for the development of various subsystems of grammar such as gender marking in Khasian, and potentially for the history of Austroasiatic as a whole.