Shobhana L. Chelliah, University of North Texas
Grammaticalization of the second verb in verb-verb sequences, through the semantic bleaching of the second verb, is an areal feature of South Asia that has spread from the Dravidian to the Indo-Aryan languages. I will show, through examples from the Tibeto-Burman language Meithei, that the diffusion of grammaticalization has further spread from the Indo-Aryan to the Tibeto-Burman languages. Unlike Indo-Aryan languages, however in addition to semantic bleaching, the grammaticalization has gone further in that verbs have become reduced phonologically and have become affixes. I argue thet this `decategorialization' is due to the typological tendency for agglutinative or polysynthetic suffixing languages to contain little or no compounding. In other words, typological pressure regulates contact induced change.