Directional Prefixes in Mu-nya

Abstract

Mu-nya is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken among Tibetan people living around Mt. Minya Konka in Sichuan Province, Southwest China. As Huang (1985) points out in detail, Mu-nya has rich vowel alternation in the verb predicate. Although her description was exhaustive, it was complex. It was thus challenging to grasp the mechanisms behind grammatical operations from her work. Mu-nya discriminates eight kinds of directions through verb prefixes: 1. /tɯ-/ ‘upward’ 2. /nɐ-/ ‘downward’ 3. /ɣɯ-/ ‘towards upstream’ 4. /ɦa-/ ‘towards downstream’ 5. /ngɯ-/ ‘towards the speaker’ 6. /tʰɐ-/ ‘away from the speaker’ 7. /rɯ-/ ‘rounding’ 8. /qʰɯ-/ ‘non-specific’. Some directional prefixes do not express real direction but are fixed combinations with specific verbs, like /qʰɯ³³- ri⁵⁵/ ‘write’, which dose not take other prefixes flexibly. Some vowel changes occurring in directional prefixes are caused by grammatical operations such transitivity. For instance, the directional prefix: /nɐ³³-/ ‘downward’ in an intransitive verb predicate, changes into /ni³³-/ in a transitive verb predicate. Examples reflecting this phenomenon are as follows: /va⁵⁵ nɐ³³- rø⁵⁵=sɯ³³/. ‘(The) butter has melted.’ and /ŋi⁵⁵ va⁵⁵ ni³³-rø⁵⁵ ŋɐ³³/. ‘I (have) melted (the) butter.’ In this report I describe the basic grammatical functions and vowel changes of the directional prefixes in the Mu-nya language.