Core participant marking in Khumi

In Bangladesh Khumi, core participants (S, A, P, and R) frequently occur with three apparent case markers: =lö1, =mö3, and =a1. Examination of these elements’ distribution in a large naturalistic text corpus, however, reveals the first two have primarily discourse motivations. =lö1 is a straightforward topic marker. =mö3 , which occurs mainly with A participants, would appear to be an ergative marker, but its distribution is much wider than A, including obliques, adverbials, and even P and S; it is concluded that it has more of a foregrounding function, including some types of focussing. =a1 is simply an extension of a general Kuki Chin locative marker, used mostly with animate Ps, but consideration of discourse data shows that use or…