The project is a comprehensive analysis of the verbal system of Ho, a North Munda language spoken in Central Eastern India. The primary aims are to document authentic examples of connected fluent text and to provide an analyzed body of elicited verb forms, as well as simple and complex clauses, and to develop a typologically and theoretically-informed analysis of Ho verb forms.
As the first detailed linguistic analysis of Ho verbs, this project contributes to Munda linguistics particularly, as well as to Austro-Asiatic and South Asian studies more generally. Ho verbal morphology is highly complex and agglutinating. Thus far, there is no complete description of the morphemes that appear in the verb. As well as describing the morphemes individually, the project addresses the nature of the apparent mismatch between phonological and grammatical words in Ho; transitivity in Ho verbs including valence-changing affixes and clause-level transitivity; and serial and compound verbs in Ho in order to understand how auxiliation works in this highly agglutinating language.
The research is conducted collaboratively with native Ho speakers in Jharkhand, India. The project is based in Ranchi, working with Ho-speaking university students, but also involves travel to villages around Chaibasa to make recordings of older, specifically female, speakers. The single most important long-term benefit of this project is the documentation and preservation of the Ho language by the Ho people themselves. The Ho language is currently in daily use by its speakers; however, nearly all speakers are bilingual with Hindi and other regional languages, such as Oriya (Indo-Aryan). This project helps raise awareness among native speakers that the time to document the language is now, while it is still in daily use.
The Ho language is spoken by approximately one million people in a highly multi-language region of eastern India. It is a previously largely undocumented Munda language, related to the Mon-Khmer languages of Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Understanding this language will help scholars better understand migrations and early history of South and Southeast Asia. Though currently in daily use, nearly all Ho speakers are bilingual in socio-politically dominant languages, such as Hindi or Oriya (Indo-Aryan). There were three concrete aims of the Ho language project: first, to document the Ho language and in the process produce materials of use to other researchers and the Ho community itself; second to analyze the verb and basic syntactic systems of Ho; and third to produce a scholarly dissertation and other publications. The co-PI spent 8 months in Jharkhand, India, over the 2-year period of the project. She worked with native speakers of Ho to collect, transcribe, and analyze texts and to comprehensively elicit information on how verb words are put together. The corpus of Ho texts now stands at around six hours of recorded and transcribed text, nearly half of which are completely analyzed and translated. The text corpus and elicited materials will be archived so that future researchers can use the data. A copy will also be given to the Department of Tribal and Regional Languages at Ranchi University. The co-PI’s dissertation is on the complex verb word structures and predication strategies of Ho. One interesting finding is that Ho has definable word classes of verb, noun and adjective. Previous researchers argued that Mundari (a closely related North Munda language) does not have such categories and hence any word can be used anywhere in the sentence. However, Ho linguistic patterns show that Ho speakers are indeed sensitive to the part of speech of a word, as different sentence constructions are used for intransitive predication depending on the word class of a given predicate. Using the collected data, she has been analyzing the Ho verb and its suffixes. There are complex and distinct patterns in how verb words are composed, depending on aspect (e.g., perfective/completive or imperfective/progressive situation), number of core participants, and lexical meaning of the predicate. The Ho verb is of high scientific interest with regard to the notion of transitivity and its relationship to linguistic aspect. A transitive sentence is sometimes defined as one in which there is a direct object. However, in Ho, some clauses with direct objects are not marked as transitive in the verb. When the object is non-referential or indefinite, the sentence is treated more like an intransitive one. Conversely there are intransitive sentences which are marked as if they were transitive. The notion of transitivity for Ho is perhaps more sensitive to whether the action itself is completed (i.e., it is sensitive to aspect) and to how much control the subject has, rather than to the presence or absence of an object. Another interesting finding is that Ho seems to be developing tense marking in the verb. Ho has been considered more of an "aspect-oriented" language by previous researchers because notions of aspect are marked in the verb, but indications of tense (such as present, past future) are not. However, a past tense interpretation regularly results from of a specific combination of affixes; similarly a future tense interpretation results from another specific combination of affixes. These findings contribute to our knowledge of how grammatical tense systems can historically develop. Research from this project will be useful for a range of researchers. The Munda languages are not widely studied or well-known. The data and analyses of Ho help historians, anthropologists, and linguists to understand the history of the language family. It also helps language typologists and theoreticians who seek to understand the nature of language in general: the more languages we have data and analyses of, the more we know about the potential of human language. The study is also important for understanding how languages can change across time, and how new grammatical categories can arise. Finally, the data are important for Ho speakers themselves, as it is relevant to development of Ho dictionaries and educational materials. One of the most important outcomes of this project has been to raise awareness among native speakers that now is the time to document their language and associated aspects of their culture, while the language is still in daily use.
