to appear in North East Indian Linguistics 3, ed. G. Hyslop, M. Post, and S. Morey Nocte and Jinghpaw: Morphological Correspondences 1 Scott DeLancey University of Oregon The genetic relationships among the Tibeto-Burman languages of eastern India and western Burma have always been problematic. While several linguists, including myself, have made stabs at sorting the problem out at higher levels, we can expect that serious progress will start with establishing lower-level groupings, on the order of Burling’s (1983) hypothesis of a special relationship among Bodo- Garo, the Konyak Naga languages, and Jinghpaw. This paper discusses data which offer significant support to Burling’s “Sal” hypothesis – I will present here what I think is strong comparative evidence for a quite close relationship between Jinghpaw and Nocte, which nails down one side of the triangular Sal grouping. 1. The Jinghpaw Tense-Aspect-Agreement Complex Jinghpaw 2 has a very peculiar verbal system, as yet far from thoroughly understood. Along with a large set of grammaticalized verbs (Matisoff 1974, DeLancey, Diehl, and Maran 1978), there is a system of morphologically complex final elements, of one or two syllables, which Dai and Diehl (2003) label “Sentence Final Words”, or SFW’s. (This may not be the most perspicuous term for the phenomenon, but for lack of a better alternative I will use it in this paper. Dai and Diehl’s SFW category actually consists of two distinct categories of SFW, which I will label prefinal and final. We will see 1 I am grateful to LaRaw Maran, my first teacher in Tibeto-Burman, who originally provided the Jinghpaw data in this paper (the evident lacunae and any other errors in their interpretation are mine fault), and to the late Dr. Alfons Weidert, who generously shared with me his unpublished notes on Nocte. 2 Examples are in the standard orthography as used in Hanson 1906, 1917, save that glottal stop, not represented in Hanson’s orthography, has been indicated in the SFW’s where it is important to my comparative argument.