The experiential construction in Assamese

This paper examines, from a Cognitive Linguistics perspective, the meaning and grammar of the experiential construction (EC) in Assamese, an Indo-Aryan language of Assam, India. This construction, which exclusively encodes experiential situations, marks the experiencer subject with either the dative or genitive case. Thus, it differs from the subject-verb (SV) intransitive construction, where the subject, whether a doer or an experiencer, is marked by nominative, absolutive, or ergative case, based on how the language organizes its subject and object marking.

This construction, a characteristic feature of many Southeast Asian languages, is commonly referred to as the ‘non-nominative subject construction’ (see e.g., Subbarao, 2012Subbarao, K. V. (2012). South Asian languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ). However, we prefer ‘experiencer construction’ because it functions as a distinct structure specifically encoding experiential situations, rather than a secondary or irregular form. The current paper argues that the construction is grounded in a distinct conceptualization, including metaphorical mappings, that shapes its grammatical structure. This underlying conceptualization presents a fundamentally non-agentive perspective for the experiencer. The Assamese examples presented in this paper come from the authors themselves, who are native speakers of Assamese.