The Punchi Language: A Typological Sketch
摘要
The Punchi language is a lesser-known, vulnerable (at risk of becoming endangered) Indo-Aryan language (IA), spoken primarily in the Poonch district of the Republic of India. Unlike the majority of the IA languages, Punchi does not find any mention as a language in official records such as in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. Punchi is a verb-final language (SOV type) with a relatively flexible word order which exhibits a complete set of nasalized vowels that produce phonemic contrast with the oral vowels while the aspirated voiced and voiceless consonants are in contrastive distribution. A high amount of inflection is observed in nominal and verbal morphology as the Punchi nouns and pronouns inflect for number, gender, and person. This language employs postpositions while the nouns and pronouns are in the oblique case. The chapter presents a synchronic account of the distinctive grammatical properties of the Punchi language such as its diverse pronoun system, the subject-auxiliary agreement, its optional ergative marking, its elaborate system of verb morphology, and the syntactic aspects of the language are also discussed.