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Article published In: Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area
Vol. 37:1 (2014) ► pp.3–33

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Second person verb forms in Tibeto-Burman

 | University of Oregon
Published online: 23 June 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ltba.37.1.01lan
Since the beginning of research on the PTB verb agreement, 2nd person marking has posed a persistent problem. Every scholar who has dealt with the problem reconstructs a set of person/number suffixes including 2sg #-n(a). But there is also strong evidence for a #t‑ prefix which also indexes 2nd person. My purpose in this paper is to summarize the results of a number of descriptions and analyses which have appeared over the last decade or so, which provide new evidence concerning the #t‑ prefix, and resolve some of the problems which had previously impeded our understanding of this form. I will show that there were two distinct verb forms used for 2nd person reference in PTB. In the final section of the paper I will speculate about the implications of this fact.
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