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A work that will be of interest to those interested in typology, language history, and contact induced change, this book documents the radical restructuring of Anong over the last 40 years under intense contact with Lisu. In the almost fifty years, Sun Hongkai has been documenting the Anong language of Yunnan China, it has undergone radical, contact-induced changes. The language of the less than forty remaining speakers is quite different than the Anong of forty years ago. Under intense contact with Lisu, major change has occurred in the language, much of it documented in this work of Sun's. The English edition is a reworking of the original Chinese version, providing annotation, an expanded lexicon, and an appendix that contains an instrumental study of the language.
This book presents a collection of papers on clusivity, a newly coined term for the inclusiveexclusive distinction. Clusivity is a widespread feature familiar from descriptive grammars and frequently figuring in typological schemes and diachronic scenarios. However, no comprehensive exploration of it has been available so far. This book is intended to make the first step towards a better understanding of the inclusiveexclusive opposition, by documenting the current linguistic knowledge on the topic. The issues discussed include the categorial and paradigmatic status of the opposition, its geographical distribution, realization in free vs bound pronouns, inclusive imperatives, clusivity in the 2nd person, honorific uses of the distinction, etc. These case studies are complemented by the analysis of the opposition in American Sign Language as opposed to spoken languages. In-depth areal and family surveys of clusivity consider this opposition in Austronesian, Tibeto-Burman, central-western South American, Turkic languages, and in Mosetenan and Shuswap.
After two decades since the disintegration of Soviet Union in 1991, the largest and the most populist socialist state — the People's Republic of China — does not only manage to stay intact, but has also emerged as the second largest economy in the world. Moreover, its political, diplomatic, military and cultural reaches have been extended to various parts of the world. There have been many factual and fictional discussions and debates in the public domains, on China's apparent rise either as a threat or an opportunity. This book will take on these discussions and debates to provide theory-informed empirical studies regarding a few research questions: We consider that the idea and concept of “Global China” is perhaps the most viable analytical instrument to capture such increasingly complex phenomena in association with the rise of China.
There are more native speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages than of any other language family in the world. Our records of these languages are among the oldest for any human language, and the amount of active research on them has multiplied in the last few decades. Now in its second edition and fully updated to include new research, The Sino-Tibetan Languages includes overview articles on individual languages, with an emphasis on the less commonly described languages, as well as descriptions and comments on the subgroups in which they occur. There are overviews of the whole family on genetic classification and language contact, syntax and morphology, and also on word order typology. There are a...
A work that will be of interest to those interested in typology, language history, and contact induced change, this book documents the radical restructuring of Anong over the last 40 years under intense contact with Lisu. In the almost fifty years, Sun Hongkai has been documenting the Anong language of Yunnan China, it has undergone radical, contact-induced changes. The language of the less than forty remaining speakers is quite different than the Anong of forty years ago. Under intense contact with Lisu, major change has occurred in the language, much of it documented in this work of Sun's. The English edition is a reworking of the original Chinese version, providing annotation, an expanded lexicon, and an appendix that contains an instrumental study of the language.
Minglang Zhou's highly erudite and well-researched volume on the policies concerning writing reforms for China's minorities since 1949 provides an original and well-reasoned summary of a complex process. It documents how different script reforms meet dramatically different fates according to local preferences, history, cross-border ties, and the vitality of previously-used scripts. It convincingly shows that no single variable is decisive in the success of a script, and that language planners' fixation with technical details is doomed to failure, without careful coordination of extra-code factors. It also documents the little-known Sino-Soviet cooperation in the area of writing reforms. In a style accessible to both undergraduate and graduate students, Zhou's book is of interest to language planners, sinologists, applied linguists, writing theorists, and ethnologists.
This pioneering book is the prototype of the etymological thesaurus that has been the goal of the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus project (STEDT) since 1987. It presents nearly 170 Proto-Tibeto-Burman etymologies in the semantic area of the reproductive system, along with discussions of possible Chinese cognates. Special attention is paid to patterns of semantic associations between the reproductive system and other areas of the lexicon.
This book is a full reference grammar of Qiang, one of the minority languages of southwest China, spoken by about 70,000 Qiang and Tibetan people in Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in northern Sichuan Province. It belongs to the Qiangic branch of Tibeto-Burman (one of the two major branches of Sino-Tibetan). The dialect presented in the book is the Northern Qiang variety spoken in Ronghong Village, Yadu Township, Chibusu District, Mao County. This book, the first book-length description of the Qiang language in English, is the result of many years of work on the language, and is as typologically comprehensive as possible. It includes not only the reference grammar, but also an et...
Language matters in China. It is about power, identity, opportunities, and, above all, passion and nationalism. During the past five decades China’s language engineering projects transformed its linguistic landscape, affecting over one billion people’s lives, including both the majority and minority populations. The Han majority have been juggling between their home vernaculars and the official speech, Putonghua - a speech of no native speakers - and reading their way through a labyrinth of the traditional, simplified, and Pinyin (Roman) scripts. Moreover, the various minority groups have been struggling between their native languages and Chinese, maintaining the former for their heritag...
This book provides an accessible account of the origins and conceptual foundations of language policy. Florian Coulmas discusses the influence of twenty intellectuals from medieval to modern times, and from a variety of cultures, who have taken issue with language, its use, development, and political potential. These 'guardians of language' range from renowned figures such as Dante, Noah Webster, and Gandhi, to less well-known individuals such as the Spanish grammarian Antonio de Nebrija and Senegalese politician and poet Léopold Sédar Senghor. Each chapter begins by providing background information on the scholar whose work is being reviewed and ends with a summary of his key thoughts on language in the form of an imaginary interview.