ABSTRACT
Malto, the northernmost of the Dravidian languages in India, is spoken by nearly 100,000 people in the Rajmahal Hills of western Jharkand and eastern Chhattisgarh. Pockets of Malto speakers also live in the states of West Bengal, Tripura and Orissa. Speakers of Malto call their language mal sapa ‘man’s language’ or malto ‘of the man’, and they call themselves maler ‘men’. The minor parts of speech such as adjective, adverb and conjunction are defined by their function, but formally may belong to one of the two main categories. Their claim to being formally defined parts of speech is partly bolstered by the defective morphology they often exhibit. Simple sentences with finite verbs vastly outnumber and show greater variety than those with predicate nominals; accordingly, statements made here concerning predicates are framed in terms of ‘verbs’. Unlike free numerals, the numeral classifier construction consists of a numeral and a classifier that indicates certain qualities of the nouns it occurs with.
