THE PROTO-TIBETO-BURMAN VERBAL AGREEMENT SYSTEM 1 By GEORGE VAN DRIEM Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden 1. Introduction Since the appearance of Stuart N. Wolfenden's monumental Outlines of Tibeto-Burman linguistic morphology in 1929, attention has increasingly focused not only on derivational processes in Tibeto-Burman, but also on the flexional morphology of conjugations and declensions. The first systematic comparison of Tibeto-Burman conjugational and pronominal morphology was James John Bauman's elaborate Pronouns and pronominal morphology in Tibeto-Burman in 1975. Bauman put to rest any lingering doubts that the conjugations of Tibeto-Burman languages could be attributed to an Austro- Asiatic substrate, and he adduced a vast body of data demonstrating the nativeness and antiquity of conjugational morphology in Tibeto-Burman. Verbal agreement in Tibeto-Burman has traditionally been known by Hodgson's term 'pronominalization', based on the assumption that conjuga- tional affixes ultimately derive from ancient independent pronouns. Bauman demonstrated that the conjugational systems of Tibeto-Burman languages, and therefore any ancient pronominal system they may reflect, are more con- servative than the independent pronominal systems attested in individual lan- guages. Based on a comparison of these conjugations, Bauman (1975: 195, 237, 247) proposed the prototypical Tibeto-Burman agreement system shown in tables l and 2. Table 1: Prototype of the intransitive verbal agreement system (Bauman 1975) ls. -I)a ld./2d. -si 2s. -na 1 pL/2pl. -i In a series of articles, I have developed a model of the Proto-Kiranti verb based on a comparison of morphemically analysed verbal agreement systems of individual Kiranti languages (van Driem 1990a, 1992, 199lb). The present study aims to assess the historical status of conjugations observed in Kiranti languages in the broader Tibeto-Burman context by investigating the conju- gations of Tibeto-Burman languages beyond the Kirant. ' Abbreviations used in this article are: 1 first person A 2 second person S 3 third person P s. singular d. dual pi. plural ns. non-singular i. inclusive e. exclusive pf. prefixal slot sf. suffixal slot I, verb stem PT NPT REF AUX agent subjet patient indicate the direction of a transitive relationship preterite non-preterite reflexive auxiliary The conventional linguistic system of transliteration of Russian has been used in this paper.