Case Marking in Jingpho

The Jingpho or Kachin language is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Kachin State and northern Shan State, Burma and adjacent areas of China and India. This paper, based on data from a 320-thousand-word corpus of Jingpho which I compiled, provides a description and analysis of the case marking system of Jingpho. An overview and list of case markers are given in section 3. Section 4 discusses case markers for S (intransitive subject), A (transitive subject), and P (transitive object), and claims explicitly. In section 5, various case markers which mark local semantic roles (locative, source and goal roles) are shown in some detail. Using concordance lines obtained from my corpus, I quantitatively analyse the difference between the two locative markers, ko? and tha?, and emonstrate that ko? typically marks spaces while tha? typically markstime, although both of them can mark spaces and time. The genitive case and genitive personal pronouns are discussed in section 6, followed by a description of the comitative marker which marks various kinds of semantic roles. Finally, nouns which function as case markers (i.e., mtu 'for', m∂lay 'instead', m∂jo 'because', and zon 'like', ) are discussed in some detail