Asia Institute - Theses
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ItemA grammar of Southern Bai( 2021)Bai is the language spoken by the Bai people located in Yunnan, China and surrounding provinces. The southern dialect, Southern Bai, is spoken by approximately 500,000 people in and around the Dali Bai Autonomous prefecture. Through a descriptive linguistics framework this study provides detailed description and analysis of the phonetic, morphological, and grammatical systems within Southern Bai. Expanding on features already described in previous studies on the central dialect, considered the standard in the People’s Republic of China, this study presents further detail and description of under described features. Among these features, discussed in this study are the limited morpho-syntactic system including inflection on personal pronouns, classifier derivation from nouns, affixation, and compounding formed from right-headed modification. Aspect marking is performed via coverbs grammaticalised from lexical verbs and sentence final pragmatic particles play a major role in the formation of non-declarative sentences. In addition to describing the linguistic systems of the language, a secondary aim was to explore how speakers express motion and placement events, which can be found in Chapter Ten. Based on this description, this study argues that Southern Bai should be considered a satellite-framed language according to Talmy’s (1985, 2000, 2007) typology. This thesis represents the first comprehensive study of Southern Bai. As such, the findings of this study can contribute to the greater typological discussions surrounding the world’s languages.