Verbal morphology and negative constructions in Nocte
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Abstract
This study explores the verbal morphology and negative construction mechanisms in Nocte, a language belonging to the Northern Naga subgroup of the Tibeto-Burman family, spoken by the Nocte community in Arunachal Pradesh, India. Based on data from the Haʔwa variety of Nocte, the research provides an in-depth analysis of the Nocte verbal morphology, with a focus on hierarchical agreement, inverse marking and cislocative. Unlike prior analyses that categorized tense and agreement markers as verbal suffixes, this study identifies agreement words as independent entities that carry tense, aspect, mood, and negation functions. The paper also highlights the complexity of negative constructions in Nocte, identifying multiple negative markers and structures that vary according to tense, context, and sentence structure. This work advances the understanding of Nocte's post-verbal morphology and situates its linguistic characteristics within the broader context of Tibeto-Burman languages.
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