Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area - Volume 42, Issue 1, 2019

Endangered tone languages are not often studied within quantitative variationist approaches, but such approaches can provide valuable insights for language description and documentation in the Tibeto-Burman area. This study examines tone variation within Yangliu Lalo (Central Ngwi), a minority language community in China that is currently shifting to Southwestern Mandarin. Yangliu Lalo’s Tone 4, the rising-falling High tone, is lowering and flattening among young people, especially females, who also tend to use Lalo less frequently. Tonal range in elicited speech is shown to be decreasing as use of Lalo decreases. Concurrently, the standard deviation of the pitch of individual tones also decreases, while at the same time speakers with a narrow tonal range also show greater articulatory precision for each tone. Tonal range and standard deviation of pitch are both parameters of tonal space, the arrangement of, and relationship between, tones within the tonal system. The results from our apparent-time study suggest that tonal space provides a new avenue of sociolinguistic inquiry for tone languages.

This article presents information regarding newly recognised non-Tibetic Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in three counties, Dzogang, Markham, and Drag-yab, of Chamdo Municipality and the adjacent Dzayul County in the Tibet Autonomous Region. First, we introduce four languages – Lamo, Larong sMar, Drag-yab sMar, and gSerkhu – identifying the location of each language on the Chinese administrative map as well as the numbers of speakers of the languages. Second, we provide a brief historical background on these languages, which suggests a relationship between them and Qiangic groups. Third, we display lexical evidence that shows not only their non-Tibetic features but also their closeness to Qiangic languages. Finally, the article focuses on Lamo, an endangered language spoken in Dzogang County, and provides a linguistic analysis of an annotated Lamo historical narrative in the Appendix.

This paper presents a preliminary investigation of nominalization and relativization in Tujia from a typological perspective. We show that there are several nominalizers in Tujia, only two of which are multifunctional: ɕi and ɲie. ɕi can function as a nominalizer, a relativizer, a complementizer, a converbal clause marker or a stance marker. ɲie can function as a genitive marker, a nominalizer, a relative clause marker, a non-relative attributive marker or a stance marker. Relative clauses in Tujia can be head internal and pre-nominal. The head internal relative clauses are marked by ɕi, while the pre-nominal relative clauses are marked by ɲie.1 We point out that ɲie manifests typical genitive-relative-nominalization syncretism, whereas ɕi manifests extended nominalization functions, both of which are widely attested in other Tibeto-Burman languages. We argue that ɕi originates from a general noun, of unknown etymology. The nominalizer ɲie originates from a genitive marker. These findings should prove useful to future typological or comparative research with respect to nominalization in Tibeto-Burman languages.

This paper surveys the forms of dual and plural pronouns across the Tibeto-Burman languages, and offers a reconstruction of the non-singular pronouns, and a general account of how various branches and languages have diverged from this original system. We can certainly reconstruct two, perhaps three, person-number portmanteaus: #i 1pl, or perhaps 1pl.inc, #ni 2pl, and, less certainly, #ka 1pl.exc. We also reconstruct #tsidual which combined with singular pronouns to make dual forms. This construction was the model on which most daughter languages have innovated an analytic system of person and number marking, with distinct person and dual and/or plural morphemes combining to make the morphologically complex but semantically transparent compositional forms found in the majority of languages.

This study presents a diachronic puzzle of the gender suffixes’ origin in Mizo personal names, -a for male and -i for female. It also provides a plausible sociolinguistic explanation for the fast spread of its use by the whole population, that is, the use of these gender suffixes was expedited as a result of the adoption by the well respected missionaries.

This short note discusses the origin and development of the use of the term “pronomenalisation” (pronominalization) in Sino-Tibetan linguistics, pointing out that the concept was originally a typological one, and that the phenomenon was seen as the result of grammaticalization, i.e. the free pronouns being copied onto the verb.