Scott Delancey

Biographic Data

ID166481
NAMEScott Delancey
GIVEN NAMESScott
FAMILY NAMEDelancey
SIGNATUREDELANCEY S
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Oregon
ORCID0000-0002-8155-099X
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS53
TOTAL CITATIONS399
AUTHOR COUNT53
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1981
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX7

  • The Dual Formative *tsi in Tibeto-Burman Languages

    Open AccessScott DelanceyARTICLEHimalayan Linguistics2026

    A pronominal dual formative derivable from *tsi, *ntsi, or *tsiŋ is attested sufficiently broadly across the Tibeto-Burman languages to require that these be reconstructed to the proto-language. In most of these languages only one of these forms occurs, and combines with pronouns to form compositional duals. However, several languages show clear association of *tsi with inclusive dual, and *ntsi with second person dual; there is also some evidenc…

  • Reconstructing stop and nasal-initial 1st person pronouns to Proto-Trans-Himalayan

    Scott DelanceyARTICLECahiers de linguistique - Asie…2024

    Two 1st person singular pronouns, #ŋa and #ka, are reconstructed for Proto-Trans-Himalayan. The functions of these roots and the relation between them in the proto-language have not been definitively established. Other work has presented a distinct case for a 1st person plural #ka in PTH . This paper compares the evidence for 1st person singular and plural #ka and argues that they are the same root, which in some languages has shifted from plural…

  • Argument Indexation (Verb Agreement) in South Central (Kuki-Chin)

    Open AccessScott DelanceyARTICLEHimalayan Linguistics2023

    The South Central languages show two distinct indexation paradigms: a set of postverbal agreement words, incorporating person-number indexation and tense/aspect/polarity marking, inherited from a pre-SC ancestor, and a set of proclitic pronouns, otherwise used as possessive clitics on nouns. The interaction of the two series differs across the branch. Some Northern Peripheral have full competing paradigms, with the choice of one or the other mark…

  • Copula to negator: Grammaticalization of the copula #ni in Tibeto-Burman languages

    Open AccessScott DelanceyARTICLEStudies in Language2023

    Van der Auwera & Vossen (2017) identify an intriguing shift from a copula to a negative marker in the Tibeto-Burman Kiranti group, and discuss it as a possible example of Jespersen’s Cycle. This paper traces a fuller history of the copula #ni , and presents an account of its association with negation, which is attested in several other Tibeto-Burman languages besides Kiranti. In most Tibeto-Burman languages the equational copula is “optional”, oc…

  • The antiquity of verb agreement in Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan)

    Open AccessScott DelanceyARTICLEBulletin of the School of…2023Cited by: 1References: 41

    This paper reviews the evidence and arguments for reconstructing a person-number agreement paradigm for the Proto-Trans-Himalayan (=Sino-Tibetan) verb, and assesses the counter-arguments which have been presented in the literature. We demonstrate the cognacy of verb agreement paradigms across the family, and show that there is no plausible subclassification of the family which would place all the attesting languages in a single branch of the fami…

  • Differential innovation in 2nd person pronouns and agreement indexation in Trans-Himalayan languages

    Scott DelanceyARTICLEFolia Linguistica2021

    Tibeto-Burman languages show a drastic difference in the stability of independent and bound 2nd person forms. The 2nd person pronoun * naŋ is the most stable form in the Proto-Trans-Himalayan paradigm, preserved in almost every low-level clade, while 1st person is sometimes replaced. But 2nd person indexation in the verb is highly unstable. There were two distinct forms already in PTH, a suffix # -na , belonging to the original paradigm, and an i…

  • Evidence for Inland Penutian

    Scott DelanceyARTICLEAnthropological linguistics2019

    Comparative evidence for the Penutian hypothesis is very thin, but more evidence has been presented in the literature for the validity of two smaller units: Plateau Penutian, consisting of Sahaptian, Cayuse, Klamath-Modoc, and probably Maiduan, and Yok-Utian, consisting of Yokuts and Miwok-Costanoan. However, some evidence for a genetic relationship between these two units are provided here. Several lexical comparisons are presented that involve …

  • Evidentiality in Tibetic

    Scott DelanceyCHAPTEROxford Handbook of Evidentiality2018

    This chapter describes the evidential and related catetgories of Tibetic languages, concentrating on the Lhasa variety. Tibetic languages show an unusual evidential system based on a three-way grammatical distinction among Factual or assumed knowledge, Egophoric or personal knowledge, and Evidential or contingent facts. Evidentiality per se, specifically the distinction between directly and indirectly acquired knowledge, is distinguished only for…

  • The Sino-Tibetan Languages

    Scott DelanceyCHAPTERWorld's Major Languages2018

    The Sino-Tibetan or Trans-Himalayan family includes several hundred languages spoken from the Pacific to the far western reaches of the Himalayas. Although Sino-Tibetan studies have seen an explosion of research over the last generation, the field is still in many ways in its infancy. Most of the languages in the family are virtually undocumented – most of the documentation which exists has been done over the last twenty-five years or so, and sch…

  • The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality

    Eithne B Carlin, A I͡U Aĭkhenvalʹd et al.BOOKOxford Handbook of Evidentiality2018Cited by: 33References: 105

    Every language has a way of saying how one knows what one is talking about, and what one thinks about what one knows. In some languages, one always has to specify the information source on which it is based-whether the speaker saw the event, or heard it, or inferred it based on something seen or on common sense, or was told about it by someone else. This is the essence of evidentiality, or grammatical marking of information source-an exciting cat…

  • The Historical Dynamics of Morphological Complexity in Trans-Himalayan

    Open AccessScott DelanceyARTICLELinguistic Discovery2015

    Certain subbranches of Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibeto-Burman) stand out as islands of complexity in a Eurasian sea of simplicity Others show a radically simpler verbal system more consistent with their South and Southeast Asian neighbors. The complex systems include elaborate systems of argument indexation; most of these reflect a hierarchical indexation paradigm, which can be traced to Proto-Trans-Himalayan. This morphology has been lost in many l…

  • Relativization and nominalization in Bodic

    Open AccessScott DelanceyARTICLEProceedings of the Annual Meeting…2014

  • Transitivity and Ergative Case in Lhasa Tibetan

    Open AccessScott DelanceyARTICLEProceedings of the Annual Meeting…2014

    Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1984), pp. 131-140

  • Agentivity and Causation: Data from Newari

    Open AccessScott DelanceyARTICLEProceedings of the Annual Meeting…2014

    Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1983), pp. 54-63

  • Second person verb forms in Tibeto-Burman

    Scott DelanceyARTICLELinguistics of the Tibeto-Burman…2014Cited by: 3References: 4

    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, w…

  • Still mirative after all these years

    Open AccessScott DelanceyARTICLELinguistic Typology2012Cited by: 22References: 8

    This article re-presents the case, first presented in DeLancey (1997), for the mirative as a crosslinguistic category, and responds to critiques of that work by Gilbert Lazard and Nathan Hill. The nature of the mirative, a category which marks a statement as representing information which is new or unexpected, is exemplified with data from Kham (Tibeto-Burman) and Hare (Athabaskan). The mirative category is shown to be distinct from the well-know…

  • Lhasa Tibetan Evidentials and the Semantics of Causation

    Open AccessScott DelanceyARTICLEProceedings of the Annual Meeting…2011

    Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1985), pp. 65-72

  • Zygmunt Frajzyngier and Erin Shay. Explaining language structure through systems interaction

    Scott DelanceyARTICLEFunctions of Language2007

    Preview this article: Zygmunt Frajzyngier and Erin Shay. Explaining language structure through systems interaction, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/fol.14.2.11del-1.gif

  • Relativization and Nominalization in Bodic

    Open AccessScott DelanceyARTICLEProceedings of the Annual Meeting…2002

    Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Tibeto-Burman and Southeast Asian Linguistics (2002)

  • The mirative and evidentiality

    Open AccessScott DelanceyARTICLEJournal of Pragmatics2001Cited by: 79References: 15

  • Argument Structure of Klamath Bipartite Stems

    Open AccessScott DelanceyARTICLEProceedings of the Annual Meeting…2000

  • Lexical Prefixes and the Bipartite Stem Construction in Klamath

    Scott DelanceyARTICLEInternational Journal of American…1999Cited by: 6References: 7

  • Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information

    Open AccessScott DelanceyARTICLELinguistic Typology1997Cited by: 102

  • The Penutian Hypothesis: Retrospect and Prospect

    Scott Delancey, Victor GollaARTICLEInternational Journal of American…1997Cited by: 11References: 20

  • The Bipartite Stem Belt: Disentangling Areal and Genetic Correspondences

    Open AccessScott DelanceyARTICLEProceedings of the Annual Meeting…1996

    Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Historical Issues in Native American Languages (1996)