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This paper presents epistemological and methodological problems found in work on the subgrouping of Sino-Tibetan languages and the reconstruction of features of the languages. A key problem is the lack of an accepted standard for judging this work, one that can stand up to statistical evaluation. An alternative methodology that involves using fixed sets of features to give us the statistical probability of common origin is suggested.
The annual conferences on Sino-Tibetan languages and linguistics began on a small scale at Yale in 1968, with only eight conferees sitting around a table, but have grown tremendously over the years, until they now usually attract over 100 participants, and have become the chief focus of scholarly activity in the field. Ever since 1971, the word “international” has appeared in the official title of the Conferences, and rightly so, since they have become truly global in scope. Since the mid-1970’s, they have increasingly been held outside the U.S.: Copenhagen (1976), Paris (1979), Beijing (1982), Bangkok (1985), Vancouver (1987), Lund (1988), Bangkok (1991), Osaka (1993), Paris (1994) [planned].
[...] Most of the papers presented at the Conferences are of high quality, and usually find their way into print within a few years. Yet in spite of valiant attempts to put out real volumes of Proceedings, e.g. the partial collection achieved for #14 (University of Florida, 1983), the most that has been managed is a photocopied version of the papers velo-bound together (e.g. for #16, University of Washington, 1983), or a collection of the abstracts submitted by the participants, e.g. for #15 (Beijing, 1982), for #18 (Ramkhamhaeng University, Bangkok, 1985), or for #25 (University of California, Berkeley, 1992). It was realized early on that it would be a good thing to keep some kind of record of which papers were presented when, before things got too badly out of hand. [...] The first version of this Bibliography (1989) was produced with admirable thoroughness and rapidity by the members of the STEDT staff. John B. Lowe devised the Macintosh software for the job, and the inputting of the authors and titles was done by many willing hands. Randy J. LaPolla did most of the editorial work on the first edition: he translated the dozens of Chinese titles, tracked down almost all the published versions of the papers by scouring journals and bibliographies, and wrote personally to many authors requesting addenda and corrigenda to the listings of their works.
The Sino-Tibetan language family enshrines the migratory histories of many East Asian populations, including the Chinese, Tibetans, and Burmese. Its history is intimately associated with Neolithic and Bronze Age developments in China itself, and today it is one of the major world language families in terms of population numbers.
Chinese is often taken as a prime example of an isolating language. Most relation marking takes the form of particles rather than affixes or inflections. Possibly relevant to the facts that are presented below, Chinese has been argued to not have grammaticalized the sort of pivot constructions normally associated with grammatical relations. That is, it has been argued to not have any particular alignment, as there are no grammatical relations, and the clause pattern is simply topic-comment (Chao 1968, Lü 1979, LaPolla 1993, 1995, 2009; LaPolla & Poa 2005, 2006). We will first talk more generally about structures found in Sino-Tibetan languages, and then focus on Modern Mandarin Chinese.
In Belhare (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal), consonant prothesis at morpheme boundaries and deletion of stem "augments" is found if either metrical or morphological parsing would violate the bimoraic trochee pattern that underlies the stress system of the language. This finding corroborates Dresher & Lahiri’s (1991) "Principle of Metrical Coherence" and provides new evidence for the cross-linguistic applicability of Crowhurst’s (1994) "Tautomorphemic Foot" constraint. The data also support a view of the Prosodic Hierarchy as weakly layered, allowing consonants to be directly dominated by the foot or word node if they are prothetic and do not therefore need feature licensing within the syllable canon.
The present volume results from an initiative to foster cooperation between scholars of Himalayan languages in Europe. The initiative was launched five years ago and has brought about a series of annual workshop meetings and individual cooperative projects (cf. http://www.isw.unibe.ch/EuroHimal). The 1998 workshop, held in Heidelberg, was devoted to the role that notions of speech act participants play in the grammar of various Himalayan languages, and the present collection represents, with some additions and some subtractions, the proceedings of this workshop. In the following I will give some background on the rationale for the topics covered in this volume, especially on the ways in which the indexing of speech act participants is related in Himalayan languages to evidentials and other epistemological operators. I will close this introduction with a brief outline of the structure of the volume.
Recent research has adduced growing evidence for a distinct stratum of cultural practices that underlies various "tribal" traditions in the Himalayan region and that also seems to be characteristic of various local versions of the Bon tradition. Bon literature is not uncommonly embedded in cultural patterns that are more specifically Himalayan than belonging to the greater South Asian heritage. Two aspects of this that have received attention in Ramble's (1997) study of a Bon guide to the sacred Kong-po mountain (rKong-po bon- ri) are the symbolism of wild boar hunting involved in marriage rituals and poison cults with their corresponding beliefs about poisoning. Another pattern of cultoral organization that may help better understand the Bon tradition against its Himalayan background is spatial conceptualization.
Sino-Tibetan is a prime example of how strongly a language family can typologically diversify under the pressure of areal spread features (Matisoff 1991, 1999). One of the manifestation of this is the average length of prosodic words. In Southeast Asia, prosodic words tend to average on one or one-and-a-half syllables. In the Himalayas, by contrast, it is not uncommon to encounter prosodic words containing five to ten syllables. The following pair of examples illustrates this.