A grammar of Pnar

This thesis provides an initial descriptive analysis of a largely undescribed Austroasiatic language of Meghalaya, northeast India. Pnar has often been overlooked because of its lexical similarity to Khasi, with which it shares a common identity and society. Features such as verb-initial constituent order, processes of nominalization and derivation, prepositional marking, a rich gender system, a large set of deictic markers, and its use of plural marking within classifier phrases prove that Pnar is richly deserving of study. The following pages attempt to thoroughly examine the phonological, morphological, and grammatical structure of this language for the benefit of the speakers and the larger linguistic community. Appendices include a selection of texts, a list of elaborate expressions, and a 1600 word lexicon.