Jackson Tianshin Sun

Sichuan has been a region of remarkable ethnolinguistic complexity since ancient times. Nowadays, it is still home to a host of typologically diverse Sino-Tibetan languages. Rife cross-linguistic interactions in this region have brought profound impact to the grammars of the local languages. Drawing on first-hand fieldwork data, this article examines three sets of Sino-Tibetan languages of Sichuan which exhibit morphosyntactic changes respectively under substratum, adstratum, and superstratum contact influences. The participating languages differ in each case (Tibetic Rgyalrong, Rgyalrong Qiang, Horpa Tibetic) but they all underwent varying degrees of structural convergence, leading to innovated inflectional morphology and syntactic patterns, and even altered grammatical profiles. Thus, to adequately explain the grammatical evolution of Sino-Tibetan languages of Sichuan, one must take into account the variegated contact phenomena existing in this area.

This chapter presents an overview of salient issues regarding the correlation between evidentiality and person. A synthesis of research findings is provided and illustrated by empirical data. The person category relevant for evidentiality is shown to be the ‘speaking person’, which translates into various grammatical persons depending on the grammatical construction. The person-sensitive distribution of evidential forms is attributable to features like control, observability, and access to knowledge, and may be creatively manipulated along an evidential directness cline, such that an evidential value reserved for the speaking person may be employed to assert intimate knowledge about another person, and conversely, a reduced evidential value may be selected in self-reports to tone down first-person involvement, exhibiting ‘first-person effects’. Also elucidated herein is how the addressee’s perspective, another critical person factor in evidentiality, shapes evidential formation and ...

This study explores the phenomenon of uvularization in the vowel systems of two Heishui County varieties of Qiang, a Sino-Tibetan language of Sichuan Province, China. Ultrasound imaging (one speaker) shows that uvularized vowels have two tongue gestures: a rearward gesture, followed by movement toward the place of articulation of the corresponding plain vowel. Time-aligned acoustic and articulatory data show how movement toward the uvula correlates with changes in the acoustic signal. Acoustic correlates of uvularization (taken from two speakers) are seen most consistently in raising of vowel F1, lowering of F2 and in raising of the difference F3-F2. Imaging data and the formant structure of [l] show that uvular approximation can begin during the initial consonant that precedes a uvularized vowel. Uvularization is reflected phonologically in the phonotactic properties of vowels, while vowel harmony aids in the identification of plain–uvularized vowel pairs. The data reported in this...

... Jackson T.-S. Sun Academia Sinica The richest verbal system among the rGyalrongic cluster of languages in Tibeto-Burman is found in the Showu dialect of rGyalrong. ... Key words:Tibeto-Burman, rGyalrongic, verbal morphology, stem formation 1. Introduction ...

... 799 Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas, is characterized by abundant derivational as well as inflectional morphology ... in the perfective and imperfective past verb forms, is also required in the low-transitivity continuous aspect (see further on), a variety of converbs, as well ...

... The label Situ, referring to the traditional territory of the four chieftaincies Zhuokeji (WT lCog.rtse), Suomo (WT So.mang), Songgang (WT ... Representative local varieties of Lavrung, some very different, include Xiaoyili (WT Yu.nas.chung) and Siyaowu (WT bSu-yo-grong) in ...

Horpa is an understudied, internally diverse Rgyalrongic cluster (Qiangic branch, Sino-Tibetan family) spoken across six counties in two prefectures of northwestern Sichuan. As this author demonstrated in an earlier article using individual-identifying morphological evidence, Northern Horpa (Stodsde) clearly belongs under Rgyalrongic (J. Sun 2000b). The phyloge-netic affinity of less conservative Horpa languages (e.g., Rta'u) is however far less obvious. This paper, drawing on extensive recent fieldwork, offers a fuller range of cross-dialect evidence in important areas of Horpa verbal morphology to vindicate the ancestry of Horpa as a Rgyalrongic subgroup. It is shown that quite banal phonological and grammatical evolutions have caused the innovating Horpa languages to cast off much of their characteristic morphology, masking their true Rgyalrongic origins.

Western Horpa (Xinlong County, Ganzi Prefecture) is a member of the Horpa language cluster under the Rgyalrongic subgroup of Qiangic, a branch of the Sino-Tibetan family. This paper analyzes the formation strategies and functional distribution of verb stems in the Jialaxi and Youlaxi dialects of Western Horpa, on the basis of our first-hand fieldwork data. The salient archaisms in Western Horpa stem alternation, identifiable via comparison with parallel morphological phenomena in the conservative Northern Horpa language, provide important clues to the original state of an obscure area of verbal morphology in Common Rgyalrongic.

This study analyses three remarkable features in the person marking system of
Sastod Rgyalrong spoken in Khrochu (Heishui) County of Aba Prefecture in northern
Sichuan: double person marking, S/A subject agreement (as opposed to the
Pan-Rgyalrongic scenario-driven split agreement), and dative-marked arguments as
agreement controllers. Comparison with other Rgyalrong languages and exploration of
semantic factors underlying the distribution of predicate types that require subject
agreement and dative marking reveal the possible evolution and typological
significance of the phenomena under study. Double person marking in Sastod
Rgyalrong appears to continue an archaic morphological trait. On the other hand,
subject agreement and core dative marking appear to be innovative developments
induced by intense contact with Qiang, embodying a typological shift towards a
dependent-marking grammatical profile. Our findings not only lend strong support to
Tsunoda’s insights regarding the repercussions of object-affectedness on syntactic
structure, but also contribute significantly to them by demonstrating that, in addition to
transitive case frames and syntactic constructions like the passive and the antipassive,
selection between agreement patterns is another valid cross-linguistic correlate of the
affectedness scale of transitive predicates.

All languages have expressions that refer to the generic person (GP), or ‘people in general’. This paper investigates from a typological perspective GP-representation in Tshobdun Rgyalrong, a morphologically complex Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Sichuan. Tshobdun marks GP predominantly with cross-linguistically the least common GP-encoding device, namely dedicated verbal morphology evolving from erstwhile nominalizers. The integration of GP into the inflectional person category as a ‘fourth person’ is a manifestation of the remarkable prominence of humanness marking in Rgyalrong grammar.

The Rgyalrongic languages (Qiangic branch, Sino-Tibetan family) are prime examples of a split verb agreement system grounded in the pragmatic salience of speech act participants. However, the Horpa language in this group presents a hybrid system involving a more intricate interplay of functional and syntactic factors despite less elaborate morphological material. Many fundamental issues of Horpa verb agreement remain to be adequately explored, despite preliminary descriptions in the literature. This paper provides a new study of verb agreement in the Gexi variety of Horpa based on first-hand fieldwork data. Compared with Shangzhai Horpa of Rangtang County, Gexi displays many points of difference in its agreement system, including reduplication as a number-marking device, and functionally differentiated special and general sets of person-marking suffixes, the former restricted to transitive singular actants. Gexi verb agreement is undergoing typological transition from pragmatics-driven split agreement to syntax-driven subject agreement, as part of a global morpho-syntactic shift from head-marking to dependent-marking grammatical type. The conversion, possibly catalyzed by contact influences from Tibetan, is still ongoing with traces of the original system in the form of alternating patterns. The phenomena under analysis constitute an intermediate stage in the evolution of Qiangic verbal agreement typology between the conservative Rgyalrong, Lavrung, and Shangzhai Horpa split-agreement type and the innovative subject-agreement type observed in Qiang and Prinmi.

This article presents a new analysis of the vocalic system of the Mawo variety of Northern Qiang. The basic Mawo vowel inventory in our view comprises four vowel pairs differentiated by the feature uvularization. All native rhymes contain just these eight vowels, plus an additional length distinction for certain vowels. Diphthongs and ‘rhotacized vowels’ posited by previous research are re-interpreted as glide-vowel sequences. The analysis improves on earlier studies in allowing a proper characterization of the contrastive vowels of the language, significant simplification of the syllable canon of its native morphemes, and more important, greater analytic insight into its phonological processes.

In the Shangzhai dialect of Horpa, an under-studied Tibeto-Burman language of northwestern Sichuan, pervasive phonological alternations occur in the morphological causative formation. This paper brings the phenomenon to bear on the historical development of alternative modes of encoding causativity in Horpa and two related rGyalrongic languages rGyalrong (proper) and Lavrung. Despite bewildering surface variations, Shangzhai Horpa can be analyzed as having a single consistently non-syllabic causative prefix s-, which exerts pressure on the already elaborate onset system and triggers multiple phonological adjustments. The excessive allomorphy and constraints exhaust the morphological means of causation coding, leading to the rise of the periphrastic causative construction as the primary causativizing strategy in the language. By contrast, the dominant mode of expressing causativity still rests in the realm of derivational morphology in the other rGyalrongic languages where the old causative prefix *s˙- remains syllabic.

This work attempts a systematic investigation into the intricate system of verbal
complementation in the Caodeng dialect of the rGyalrong language spoken in northwestern
Sichuan. Both sentence-like and reduced clauses in bi-clausal as well as mono-clausal
patterns are employed by the language to implement its repertoire of complementation
syntax, comprising a total of four true complement-clause types and four complementation
strategies. The distribution of these abundant grammatical devices depends very much on
the semantic types of predicates they are associated with, and accords to a large extent with
the typologically expected correlations between semantic integration and the likelihood for
clausal reduction.

... d. [oğl-un-dan et al-dıg-ımız] kasap son-GEN-ABL meat buy-NMLZ-1PL butcher 'the butcher whose son we buy meat from' This structural variation is syntactically motivated, ie whether or not the notional head ... soap=DET o-ldi÷ mim÷-c˙ 3SG:POSS-smell be.fragrant1-MED ...

A stem of a word is the base form to which inflectional processes apply. In some languages, verbs show alternation of stems driven by grammatical rather than phonological conditions. This phenomenon is attested only in a very limited number of branches in the Sino-Tibetan family. Based on firsthand data as well as data from secondary sources, six cases of grammatically driven stem variation in Sino-Tibetan languages are described in this study, which fall under five distinct types. The implications of this study and further research questions are discussed.