Reconstruction of the middle-marking morphology and its functions in Southern Chin

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After starting his position at Osaka University, Dr. Zakaria presented a talk on middles in Kuki-Chin languages with Dr David Peterson (Dartmouth College, USA) in February 2021. Based on their talk, they have been preparing a paper to be published in a journal. They hope to finish the paper by June 2022. He was also able to work on a paper on middle marking in Hyow, which is in press.Due to the conflict and global pandemic, he could start the remote fieldwork in Loktu only in August 2021. From May 2021 to July 2021, he did literature review on middles. In addition, he was able to write two draft papers on contact-induced changes in Hyow. He presented an invited talk based on one of the draft papers to the 2nd Workshop on Linguistic and Cultural Diversity in the Northeast India-Myanmar-Southwest China region. This paper will appear in a special edition of Journal of Asian Languages and Linguistics in 2023. He has submitted the other draft paper to an academic journal and it is currently undergoing review.From August 2021 to March 2022, he was able to record 18 Loktu texts. He has been able to transcribe and translate seven of the texts. Due to unavailability of consultants, the work progressed slowly. By this time, he was also able to elicit a word list containing possible middle verbs in Loktu. In addition, he also elicited person-marking prefixal and suffixal paradigm in Loktu and Sumtu. he has also made a draft on middles and verb-stem alternations in Southeastern languages. He expects to finish the draft by this year and submit it to the journal Language and Linguistics.