Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area - Volume 42, Issue 2, 2019

Pyu, an extinct Sino-Tibetan language once spoken in what is now Upper Burma, remains barely explored beyond the level of transliterating texts and the identification of individual words. Knowledge of Pyu grammar has advanced little over the past century. This article (1) presents a methodology for discovering the syntax of Pyu, (2) identifies five word classes and their combinatorial properties, (3) lists all known grammatical morphemes with notes on usage, (4) formulates rules of word order, and (5) demonstrates how all of the above can elucidate the meaning of a previously undeciphered Pyu inscription. Over 200 examples are provided.

Politeness strategies using specific word forms and morphemes are well known in Tibetan, in which honorific expressions are in the majority. However, for Amdo Tibetan the politeness register is less well known. In this paper, the humilific politeness system of Mabzhi Amdo Tibetan is discussed in terms of ten morphologically-formed types, eight types of noun suffixes (/-ŋən/, /-tɕ^həl/, /-tɕ^həχ/, /-c^hoχ/, /-^ɦdəx/, /-ʈʋ̩/, /-^rgen/, and /-^ʂti/), and two adjective types (/ʔa x^ha ma/ and /ⁿɖa ⁿɖa/), as well as suppletion. In addition, the article discusses both the use and misuse of humilifics providing case examples from natural conversation settings as well as a crosstalk (kha shags) performance to illustrate how humilifics are deployed, treated, and evaluated in the contemporary world of Mabzhi Tibetans.

Guiqiong, like most Sino-Tibetan languages, presents a rich array of relativization constructions. Based on both natural oral texts and elicited material, the present paper describes all attested types of relatives in Guiqiong, including prenominal, head-internal, headless, and double-headed relative clauses, as well as nominalized and non-nominalized relative clauses. It provides a case by case account of the possible constructions for all syntactic roles including various types of obliques. This paper will also discuss different relativization strategies used in Guiqiong. To conclude, this paper will discuss the importance and the relevance of this study to Sino-Tibetan linguistics.

This research provides quantitative evidence of the decline in Nuosu competence among the young Nuosu generation in Liangshan, Sichuan, China, through a direct comprehensive linguistic measurement of their Nuosu-Chinese bilingual competence. Although the young generation can still speak Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman language, as fluently as the elder Nuosu generations without apparent difficulty, this research identifies the subtle change of competence before it becomes widely noticeable. A sample of 34 ethnic Nuosu of three generations was tested in Xichang, Liangshan, through measuring their core or implicit language knowledge (i.e. morphology, syntax, lexicon, semantics, and pragmatics) in Nuosu and Chinese. The participants were from seven Shynra-speaking counties and two Yynuo-speaking counties, mainly within Liangshan. The test format was listening and speaking, to include illiterate speakers. It was found that all elder and middle-aged subjects still possessed monolingual baseline competence, which was stable and maintained at a high level. However, only half of the young Nuosu subjects achieved monolingual baseline competence in Nuosu. The other half, though still considered as native speakers of Nuosu, had lower and more varied competence; however, almost all of them achieved monolingual baseline competence in Chinese. The Nuosu speech community in Liangshan is shifting from Nuosu-dominant bilingualism to Chinese-dominant bilingualism. Moreover, the present study proposes a typology of native speakers and a typology of bilinguals based on different levels of competence obtained from the current sample.