A Descriptive Grammar of Eastern Minyag: An Undescribed Tibeto- Burman Language

Abstract

This dissertation is a descriptive grammar of the Mujuka dialect of Eastern Minyag (ISO 639-3:emq), an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Shímián County (CH: 石棉县) and Jiǔlóng County (CH: 九龙县), Sìchuān Province (CH: 四川省), People’s Republic of China. It is primarily focused on morphological and intra-clausal description, with Chapters §3-§6 representing the most contentful portions of the grammar. Chapter §1: Introduction gives background information on the project, language, and speaker community. Chapter §2: Phonology presents Eastern Minyag phonology, covering the language’s inventory of consonants and vowels, syllable structure, prosodic features, and phonological processes. The chapter includes spectrograms and waveforms extracted from high-quality recordings. Chapter §3: Word Classes introduces major and minor word classes in Eastern Minyag with a special focus on morphology unique to each class. Chapter §4: The Noun Phrase considers noun phrase structure, modification, and coordination. Its primary focus is the semantic and syntactic features of two types of noun phrase modifiers: determiners and genitive phrases. Chapter §5: Verbs introduces verbal morphology, monoclausal multi-verb constructions, and post-verbal TAME particles. Chapter §6: Clause Structure describes basic types of simple clauses, grammatical relations, information structure marking, and clause final particles. Chapter §7: Interclausal Continuity is a brief presentation of complex constructions and strategies for joining simple clauses in discourse. There are four appendices. Appendices A and B are annotated texts. Appendix C is a translated bibliography of Chinese sources on the Eastern Minyag language and people. Appendix D details the contents of this study’s archived corpus of language data.