Download A Grammar of Qiang: With annotated texts and glossary by Randy J. LaPolla,Chenglong Huang PDF

This booklet is an entire reference grammar of Qiang, one of many minority languages of southwest China, spoken by way of approximately 70,000 Qiang and Tibetan humans in Aba Tibetan and Qiang self sufficient Prefecture in northern Sichuan Province. It belongs to the Qiangic department of Tibeto-Burman (one of the 2 significant branches of Sino-Tibetan). The dialect provided within the e-book is the Northern Qiang style spoken in Ronghong Village, Yadu Township, Chibusu District, Mao County. This ebook, the 1st book-length description of the Qiang language in English, is the results of a long time of labor at the language, and is as typologically entire as attainable. It comprises not just the reference grammar, but additionally an ethnological evaluation, a number of absolutely analyzed texts (mostly conventional stories), and an annotated glossary.

The language is verb ultimate, agglutinative (prefixing and suffixing), and has either head-marking and based marking morphology. The phonology of Qiang is sort of complicated, with 39 consonants at seven issues of articulation, plus advanced consonant clusters, either in preliminary and ultimate place, in addition to vowel concord, vowel size differences, and a suite of retroflexed vowels. The grammar is also advanced, with a paradigm of 8 path marking verbal prefixes, and paradigms for individual marking, one for actor, one for non-actor, and a number of different verbal prefixes and suffixes, in addition to convinced and quantity marking on nouns. Noun words take classifiers and relational pospositions as well.