Towards a typology of information structuring in Munda languages

Abstract

Munda languages use morpholexical, syntactic and prosodic means to encode information structure of various types. These parameters are independent but may be interdependent. Based on two distantly related languages of the family, Sora of the Sora-Gorum branch and Mundari of the Kherwarian branch we provide details on each of these three means of encoding information structure. There is some evidence that two of the morpholexical means that are productive in Mundari and restricted in Sora may be old formants encoding information structure in the family. Prosodic means appear to show no correlation across the languages and syntactic means of encoding information structure show some commonalities that could be retentions of an earlier proto-language system, while others are clearly language-specific.