400 Sprache
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Part of a Book (17)
- Article (10)
- Preprint (3)
- Conference Proceeding (1)
- Report (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (32)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (32)
Keywords
- Sinotibetische Sprachen (32) (remove)
Adjectives in Qiang
(2004)
Qiang is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by 70,000-80,000 people in Northern Sichuan Province, China, classified as being in the Qiang or Tibetan nationality by the Chinese government. The language is verb final, agglutinative (prefixing and suffixing), and has both head-marking and dependent-marking morphology.
Thirty-one years ago Tsu-lin Mei (1961) argued against the traditional doctrine that saw the subject-predicate distinction in grammar as parallel to the particular- universal distinction in logic, as he said it was a reflex of an Indo-European bias, and could not be valid, as ‘Chinese ... does not admit a distinction into subject and predicate’ (p. 153). This has not stopped linguists working on Chinese from attempting to define ‘subject’ (and ‘object’) in Chinese. Though a number of linguists have lamented the difficulties in trying to define these concepts for Chinese (see below), most work done on Chinese still assumes that Chinese must have the same grammatical features as Indo-European, such as having a subject and a direct object, though no attempt is made to justify that view. This paper challenges that view and argues that there has been no grammaticalization of syntactic functions in Chinese. The correct assignment of semantic roles to the constituents of a discourse is done by the listener on the basis of the discourse structure and pragmatics (information flow, inference, relevance, and real world knowledge) (cf. Li & Thompson 1978, 1979; LaPolla 1990).
Chao Yuen Ren (1892–1982)
(2005)
Y. R. Chao is easily the most famous linguist to have come out of China. Born before the end of the last dynasty in China, he received a traditional Confucian education, but was also one of the first Chinese people to be sent to the West for training in modern Western science (under the Boxer Indemnity Fund). The remarkable breadth and scope of his studies included physics, mathematics, linguistics, musical and literary composition, and translation, and he was a pioneer in many of these fields.
Many linguists in China and the West have talked about Chinese as a topic-comment language, that is, a language in which the structure of the clause takes the form of a topic, about which something is to be said, and a comment, which is what is said about the topic, rather than being a language with a subject-predicate structure like that of English. Y. R. Chao (1968), for example, said that all Chinese clauses have topic-comment structure and there are no exceptions.
Evidentiality in Qiang
(2003)
The Qiang language is spoken by about 70,000 (out of 200,000) Qiang people, plus 50,000 people classified as Tibetan by the Chinese government. Most Qiang speakers live in Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau in the mountainous northwest part of Sichuan Province, China. The Qiang language is a member of the Qiangic branch of the Tibeto-Burman family of the Sino-Tibetan stock. Within Tibeto-Burman, a number oflanguages show evidence of evidential systems, but these systems cannot be reconstructed to any great time depth. The data used in this chapter is from Ranghang Village, Chibusu District, Mao County in Aba Prefecture.
In many languages, clauses can be subordinated by means of case markers. For Bodic languages, a branch of Sino-Tibetan, Genetti (1986) has shown that the meaning of case markers on clauses is in most instances a natural extension of their function on nouns. A dative, for example, which marks a referential goal with a noun, signals a situational goal, i.e., a purpose, when used on a clause. Among the case markers recruited for subordination, we not only get relatively concrete cases like datives, comitatives and various types of locatives, but also core argument relators such as ergatives and accusatives. In this paper, I focus on ergative markers in one subgroup of Bodic, viz. in Kiranti languages spoken in Eastern Nepal, especially in Belhare.
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.