Berkeley DissertationTitle: A STUDY OF THE BAI (MINJIA) LANGUAGE ALONG HISTORICAL LINES Abstract: This work combines two complementary studies that are based on different materials: (1) application of the comparative method to a dialect glossary of Bai, and (2) analysis of spoken text materials collected by the author during two years of research and study in the People's Republic of China. While the nature and genetic status of Bai remain controversial until now, with some scholars exploiting unusual Bai/Chinese correspondences to reconstruct an ancestral stage of Sinitic, what the comparative study of Bai dialects shows is that internal correspondence patterns that are clearly regular and inherent to the dialects involve lexical morphemes of different proveniences, Chinese as well as Tibeto-Burman. That being the case, it is not clear whether such patterns are more appropriately viewed in the context of historical developments well established for parts of Chinese, or alternatively, linked with developments now generally acknowledged as diagnostic for the Loloish grouping of Tibeto-Burman. This type of mixed resemblance is not inconsistent with the picture we get from looking at the Bai grammar, as is demonstrated by the preliminary analysis in Chapter 3 of text materials recorded from a native speaker. The grammar that emerges from study of these spoken materials suggests a significant literary influence from Chinese. A pronoun system that is inflected for case in genitive functions shows extended applications to nominalization (in combination and competition with a true nominalizing particle), and a system of verbal functors operating in ordered serial constructions allows comparison to well-established analyses of similar paradigms in Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages. The consultant's language is considered in the light of published descriptions available for the Bai dialects, and found to consistently represent the standard dialect of Jianchuan despite systematic departures, some of which may be treated as supporting evidence for reconstruction of retroflex consonants, rare in the modern dialects. Unusual phonation-type features of the consultant's speech are described and drawn into the comparative study, where they figure in tonogenetic speculations leading to a proposal for convergence of different historical sound changes from two source languages at an earlier stage. Considered study of the linguistic data raises questions about the historical background of the Bai speech community, and the present work adds some new information in this domain in an introduction based mainly on scholarly materials obtained recently in China. |
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http://web.simmons.edu/~wiersma/diss.html
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Contact
gwiersma@mit.edu
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