A Grammar of Longxi Qiang
Zheng Wuxi
Southwest Jiaotong University
Longxi Qiang is a Tibetan-Burman language spoken by 3, 300 people in northwestern China.
This book presents a comprehensive grammatical description of Longxi Qiang, a little-studied Qiang language of Sichuan. It contains 14 chapters that covers phonology, nominal and verbal form classes, adverbs, nominal morphology, aspect, person, mood, evidentiality, epistemic modality, negation, structure of clause, clause combining and discourse features.
Longxi Qiang is a tonal, verb-final, agglutinative language. It is a head-marking and dependent-marking language. Nominal morphological processes in Longxi Qiang include compounding, derivation and inflection. Verbal morphology includes person, aspect, mood, direction, causation, evidentiality, and negation morphemes. Agentive marking in Longxi Qiang is semantically and pragmatically motivated, not syntactically motivated. Person markers reflect aspect to a great degree. Co-reference in texts can be realized by a pronoun, ellipsis, a repeated form and by lexical replacement.
The production of this book is based on the author’s PhD dissertation. One of the examiners comments that the completion of this dissertation is an important achievement, filling a lacuna in the description of endangered languages of Southern China.
ISBN 9783862888313 (Hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Asian Linguistics 86. 307pp. 2017.
