Optionality and paradigmaticity

Zooming in from the grand-scale descriptions of the Mainland Southeast Asian convergence area, this paper focuses on Htanaw, an Austroasiatic language in Myanmar’s Shan State. Close contact with Burmese/Intha, Pa’O, and Shan led to a restructuring of Htanaw, exemplified here by the verb phrase, which exhibits an intriguing mixture of (isolating) Austroasiatic and (morphologically complex) Tibeto-Burman features. The Htanaw VP is internally complex with optional bound morphemes expressing grammatical and semantic categories. Based on original fieldwork data and available published material, this study presents the dynamics of the Htanaw verb phrase patterns and puts them in an areal typological perspective.