Indian Journal of LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS

: The paper gives an account of pronouns in Lotha, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nagaland, India. Lotha is a generic name and refers to both the linguistic group and the ethno-cultural entity. Lothas are racially Mongoloid and linguistically, it has been classified under the Central Naga group of the Naga sub-branch of the Tibeto-Burman languages. Pronouns in Lotha are free forms which can function solely to fill the position of a noun phrase in a clause. Personal pronouns are typically deixis to the speech participants for each of the three grammatical person i.e. first person, second person and third person. In annex to person, numbers i.e. singular, dual and plural are also distinguished on pronouns. Personal pronouns in Lotha are independent and free-standing and for that matter it takes case-markers and postposition in similar ways as full noun phrase. The first, second and third personal pronouns take case marking only when it serves as a subject and does not take any case markers when it serves as an object. Demonstrative pronouns function in several ways based on proximity and distance in time. Lotha has three-way distinction of identifying demonstrative pronoun i.e. proximate, distance and remote marked by ʃ i ‘this’ (near the speaker), ci ‘that’(near the hearer) and o-ci ‘over there’( far away from both the speaker and hearer). The interrogative pronouns kv ə , ndo and ot ʃɔ are attached to the bound nominal suffixes. Indefinite pronouns can be formed from the question words which can change to affirmative by attaching the indefinite suffix -sana and its negative particle counterpart mek. Reflexive pronoun in Lotha is expressed by the reflexive lexeme b ɔ b ɔ ‘self’ which is a free morpheme .


Introduction
Lotha is a generic name and refers to both the linguistic group and the ethno-cultural entity.Linguistically, Lotha has been classified under the Central Naga group of the Naga sub-branch of the Tibeto-Burman languages (Eberhard et.al, 2020).Lotha is one of the major languages spoken in Nagaland.The speakers of Lotha are scattered all over Nagaland but the majority are concentrated mainly at Wokha district of Nagaland.Lotha has no script of its own and has adopted the Roman script introduced by the British and the American Missionaries in the late 19th century.According to the Census of India (2011), the total number of Lotha speakers is 1, 66,343.Similarly, Lewis et.al (2015) list a total number of 1, 66,000 Lotha speakers.Lotha has a number of varieties but, the variation is mainly at the phonological level, that is, the accent of the speaker, which varies from village to village.However, for the purpose of literary works, the variety spoken in central villages, particularly in and around

Pronouns in Lotha
Pronouns in Lotha are free forms which can function solely to fill the position of a noun phrase in a clause.Personal pronouns are typically deixis to the speech participants for each of the three grammatical person i.e. first person, second person and third person.In annex to person, numbers i.e. singular, dual and plural are also distinguished on pronouns.Personal pronouns in Lotha are independent and free-standing and for that matter it takes case-markers and postposition in similar ways as full noun phrase.The first, second and third personal pronouns take case marking only when it serves as a subject and does not take any case markers when it serves as an object.Demonstrative pronouns function in several ways based on proximity and distance in time.Lotha has three-way distinction of identifying demonstrative pronoun i.e. proximate, distance and remote marked by ʃi 'this' (near the speaker), ci 'that'(near the hearer) and o-ci 'over there'( far away from both the speaker and hearer).The interrogative pronouns kvə, ndo and otʃɔ are attached to the bound nomonal suffixes.Indefinite pronouns can be formed from the question words which can change to affirmative by attaching the indefinite suffix -sana.Reflexive pronoun in Lotha is expressed by the reflexive lexeme bɔbɔ 'self' which is a free morpheme.

Personal pronouns
Personal pronouns are typically deixis to the speech participants for each of the three grammatical person i.e. first person, second person and third person.In annex to person, numbers i.e. singular and plural are distinguished on pronouns.In terms of numbers Lotha has singular, dual and plural pronouns.A paradigm of personal pronouns of Lotha is shown in Table 1 below In Lotha the third person singular, in a free speech the speaker always use the male form of pronoun 'ombɔ' for reference, irrespective of the gender whether it's a male or female; however in orthography the female is referred to as 'ombvə' and the male as 'ombɔ'.Personal pronouns in Lotha are independent and free-standing and for that matter it takes case-markers and postposition in similar ways as full noun phrase.The first, second and third personal pronouns take case marking only when it serves as a subject and does not take any case markers when it serves as an object.The following examples show how case is incorporated in personal pronouns: 'they went to field' In the first person pronoun, the nominative case marker -nɔ is marked on the plural but not on the first person singular.In the second person pronoun the nominative -nɔ is marked on both the singular and plural.In  , 1(1) (2020), 57-66 | 60 the third person pronoun the nominative -nɔ is marked only on the third person plural and not on the singular.-nɔ is associated with only interrogatives in the second person singular but interrogatives can extend to first, second and third person plural.
The nominative marker -yɔ is exclusive only for the first person singular.In the first person pronoun, the nominative case marker -yɔ is marked on the first person singular but not on the plural.Whereas in the second and third person pronoun the nominative -yɔ is unmarked on all the three numbers i.e. singular, dual and plural.
A paradigm of how the nominative cases -nɔ and -yɔ is incorporated in the personal pronouns and numbers is shown below in table 2.

Possessive Pronouns
Following Picallo (2; 1994) Lotha possessive pronominalization is possible only for arguments that are assigned genitive case, and are referred to as weak pronouns because a strong pronoun agrees with its intended referent in person, gender, and number, while the possessive agrees with the N head.In Lotha the genitive functions both as dependent and independent, where the dependent is not marked for possessive but the independent genitive is marked for possessive.The following examples show how possessive pronouns functions in Lotha on a dependent and independent genitives as seen in the table belowː 'That book is their's' Dependent genitive pronouns which are often referred to as weak possessives serve more like determiners in front of nouns whereas independent genitive pronouns take the place of a phrase.Most of the possessive markers in Lotha have separate forms for the dependent and independent functions of genitive on personal pronouns.The same genitive is attached to the singular, dual and the plural as seen in table 3 however in the first person singular and the second person singular the particle 'e' is dropped and is replace with -tʃə.

Demonstrative pronouns
Demonstratives pronouns occupy the pre-head modifying position in a noun phrase.Demonstrative in Lotha functions in several ways based on proximity and distance in time.Lotha has three-way distinction of identifying demonstrative pronoun i.e. proximate, distance and remote marked by ʃi 'this' (near the speaker), ci 'that'(near the hearer) and o-ci 'over there'( far away from both the speaker and hearer).There is no particular affix to mark proximity and distance but remoteness is marked by the prefix oin the language.There are no separate plural demonstratives pronouns, the plural marker suffix -aŋ is attached to a singular pronoun to form a plural demonstrative pronouns as in ʃi-aŋ 'these', ci-aŋ 'those', o-ci-aŋ 'those over there'.The locative is marked by the suffix -lo as in ʃi-lo 'here', ci-lo 'there' and o-ci-lo 'over there'.The interrogative kvə can have the question-answer morphological settings as seen in the following table 4.

Indefinite pronouns
Indefinite pronouns in Lotha refer to a person, an object or a thing which are not specified.They can be formed from the question words which can change to affirmative by attaching the indefinite suffix -sana.Indefinite pronouns generally occur in a series like the English some-series, any-series and no-series (Haspelmath. 11: 1997).
Following Haspelmath Lotha have sana series and mek series, where the former is a suffix and the latter is a particle and stands next to the pronoun stem in both the cases.The following table show how indefinite pronouns behave in Lotha.'nowhere' In an affirmative and negative structure of an indefinite pronoun, there is a phonological change in the vowel.The mid tone (ɔ) changes to high tone (i) when a present and present progressive is added to the negative structure.Bhat (79;2004) defines reflexive as a term generally used to denote co reference between two different noun phrases however, the notion that underlies the use of this device is primarily a distinction between actions that affect the performer himself on the one hand and the ones that affect some other person or object on the other.Reflexive pronoun in Lotha is expressed by the reflexive lexeme bɔbɔ 'self' which is a free morpheme.The list of reflexive pronouns in Lotha is shown in table 6 below.'they (two of them) came by themselves'

Reflexive Pronouns
The reflexive pronouns can carry case markers as seen in ( 20), ( 22) and ( 25), where the first person singular, first person plural and second person singular are marked with nominative case markers.

Conclusion
Pronouns in Lotha are free forms which can function solely to fill the position of a noun phrase in a clause.Personal pronouns are typically deixis to the speech participants for each of the three grammatical person i.e. first person, second person and third person.In annex to person, numbers i.e. singular, dual and plural are also distinguished on pronouns.In Lotha the third person singular, in a free speech the speaker always use the male form of pronoun 'ombɔ' for reference, irrespective of the gender whether it's a male or female; however in orthography the female is referred to as 'ombvə' and the male as 'ombɔ'.Personal pronouns in Lotha are independent and free-standing and for that matter it takes case-markers and postposition in similar ways as full noun phrase.The first, second and third personal pronouns take case marking only when it serves as a subject and does not take any case markers when it serves as an object.The nominative case in Lotha occurs in two different shapes conditioned by person and number system of case marking.In Lotha there are two nominative case markers -no, and -yo which appears on the subject of both transitive and intransitive verbs conditioned by person and number.
In Lotha possessive pronominalization is possible only for arguments that are assigned genitive case.In Lotha the genitive functions both as dependent and independent, where the dependent is not marked for possessive but the independent genitive is marked for possessive.Dependent genitive pronouns which are often referred to as weak possessives serve more like determiners in front of nouns whereas independent genitive pronouns take the place of a phrase.Most of the possessive markers in Lotha have separate forms for the dependent and independent functions of genitive on personal pronouns.The same genitive is attached to the singular, dual and the plural as seen in table 3 however in the first person singular and the second person singular the particle 'e' is dropped and is replace with -tʃə.
Demonstrative in Lotha functions in several ways based on proximity and distance in time.Lotha has three-way distinction of identifying demonstrative pronoun i.e. proximate, distance and remote marked by ʃi 'this' (near the speaker), ci 'that'(near the hearer) and o-ci 'over there'( far away from both the speaker and hearer).There is no particular affix to mark proximity and distance but remoteness is marked by the prefix oin the language.There are no separate plural demonstratives pronouns, the plural marker suffix -aŋ is attached to a singular pronoun to form a plural demonstrative pronouns as in ʃi-aŋ 'these', ci-aŋ 'those', o-ci-aŋ 'those over there'.The locative is marked by the suffix -lo as in ʃi-lo 'here', ci-lo 'there' and o-ci-lo 'over there'.
Interrogative pronouns are question words which ask questions about people, object or things.The interrogative pronouns kvə, ndo and otʃɔ are attached to the bound nominal suffixes.
Indefinite pronouns in Lotha refer to a person, an object or a thing which is not specified.They can be formed from the question words which can change to affirmative by attaching the indefinite suffix -sana and its negative particle counterpart mek.In an affirmative and negative structure of an indefinite pronoun, there is a phonological change in the vowel.The mid tone (ɔ) changes to high tone (i) when a present and present progressive is added to the negative structure.
Reflexive pronoun in Lotha is expressed by the reflexive lexeme bɔbɔ 'self' which is a free morpheme.

Table 2
Incorporation of nominative case on personal pronouns

Iss 1 Year 2020 Yantsubeni Ngullie /2020 DOI: 10.34256/ijll2016
The following illustrations show how demonstrative pronouns in Lotha functions.The locative demonstratives pronoun ʃi-lo 'here', ci-lo 'there' and o-ci-lo 'over there' are formed by the demonstratives this and that by adding the locative suffix -lo.The following examples illustrated below show how locative demonstratives occur in Lotha.Interrogative pronouns are question words which ask questions about people, object or things.The interrogatives are attached to the bound nominal suffixes as seen in the following data.

Table 4
Interrogative settings

Table 5
Indefinite forms

Table 6
List of reflexive pronouns 2P REFL 'yourselves'(two of them) nte bɔbɔ 2P REFL 'yourselves'(more than two of them)