The Two Adjective Classes
in Manange
Carol Genetti and Kristine Hildebrandt
Manange is a Tibeto-Burman language, spoken in the Annapurna region of the
Himalayas in Nepal.^1 Manange is a member of the Tamangic sub-family of Tibeto-
Burman (also known as Gurungic, or TGTM), and is closely related to the other
languages of that family.
Manange has two lexical classes of terms which code property concepts. One
class is wholly distinct from both nouns and verbs. We will refer to this as the class
of'simple adjectives'. The other class shares some inflectional properties with verbs,
so we will refer to it as the class of'verb-like adjectives'. Verb-like adjectives do dif-
fer from verbs in important respects, and we will argue that they are a distinct lex-
ical class, essentially a hybrid, having some verbal and some adjectival properties.
- Typological overview
Typological descriptions of Tibeto-Burman languages often point out that there
are two distinct structural profiles to be found in the family (Matisoff 1990: 113,
19913: 485-6, and i99ib; LaPolla 2001: 234-6; see Masica 1976 for discussion of
South Asia as a linguistic area). Languages in the 'Sinosphere' (roughly Southeast
Asia) tend to be analytic, with little morphology, monosyllabic, or sesquisyllabic
lexical structures, extensive compounding, complex tonal systems, and serial verb
constructions.^2 Languages in the 'Indosphere' (roughly the Himalayas and South
Asia) tend to be more agglutinative, with polysyllabic structures, extensive case
and verb morphology, and detailed marking of interpropositional relationships.
Manange (like the other Tamangic languages) is an interesting case to examine
in this regard, as geographically it fits squarely in the 'Indospheric' Himalayas, but
typologically it shares more features with the Sinospheric languages.
(^1) Funds for this study were provided by the US National Science Foundation, grant BNS 9729005.
We'd like to thank Ms Romi Gurung for her insightful comments into this aspect of her native lan-
guage.
(^2) Matisoff (1999) describes a sesquisyllable as a minor, unstressed syllable. The vowel of a sesqui-
syllable is typically reduced to schwa. Sesquisyllables typically occur between consonant clusters or
as the vowel of grammatical prefixes in Tibeto-Burman languages of South-east Asia.