ABSTRACT
More often than not, expressives are unsung heroes of any grammar of South Asian languages. This chapter reviews the form-meaning pairing that presents a challenge exactly because of its complex semantics. It draws examples from the languages of the Indo-Aryan family, Austroasiatic family including the Munda group, the Davidian language family and especially from the languages of the Himalayan region, namely, Tai-Kadai, and Tibeto-Burman. Expressives behave and function like regular words and thus form a part of the lexicons of Indian languages. Unlike many other languages of the world, expressives in Indian languages can form predicates. As in other South Asian languages, Tangkhul Naga expressives can occupy both the verbal and the adverbial slots, thereby meaning that an expressive either forms the predicate or occurs in adjunct position as a verbal modifier. Expressives in general are categories which encode one or more schematic meanings across different but interrelated conceptual-semantic domains.
