Directional categories in Kathmandu Newar

Abstract

Kathmandu Newar has directional morphemes that are used as prefixes to form compound verbs and adverbs (Hargreaves 2004). They can be classified into three categories in terms of types of spatial orientation: (1) location of/direction toward spatially demarcated areas (du ‘in’ and pi ‘out’), (2) horizontal attitudes (li ‘back’ and nhya ‘front’), and (3) vertical attitudes (kwa ‘down, ’ tha ‘up, ’ de ‘on top, ’ and cwa ‘above’). There are no deictic directional prefixes in this language. Although some other Tibeto-Burman languages have directional affixes that also mark aspect and modality on or in verbs, such as the Qiangic languages, the Kuki-Chin languages, and Jingpaw, the directional prefixes of Kathmandu Newar are still at the lexical stage and indicate only directions. The use of directional prefixes on verbs is also not productive, and direction/location adverbs formed with them are more productively used to indicate directions of verbs instead. Aspect and modality senses are, in turn, expressed by directed motion verbs (wane ‘to go, ’ waye ‘to come, ’ chwaye ‘to send, ’ and haye ‘to bring’). They appear in the second slot of the Verb-Verb complex as auxiliary verbs in this language. In Kathmandu Newar, direction and grammaticalized senses based on direction are more widely expressed by syntactic means rather than morphological derivation.