ResearchOnline@JCU This file is part of the following work: Bai, Junwei (2019) A grammar of Munya. PhD Thesis, James Cook University. Access to this file is available from: https://doi.org/10.25903/2shv%2Dx307 Copyright © 2019 Junwei Bai. The author has certified to JCU that they have made a reasonable effort to gain permission and acknowledge the owners of any third party copyright material included in this document. If you believe that this is not the case, please email [email protected] A Grammar of Munya by Junwei BAI, MA A thesis submitted to College of Arts, Society and Education James Cook University, Australia in fulfillment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2019 Disclaimer I declare that this thesis is my own work and has not been submitted in any form for another degree or diploma at any university or other institution of tertiary education. Infor­ mation derived from the published or unpublished work of others has been acknowledged in the text and a list of references is given. As the copyright owner of this thesis, I grant James Cook University a permanent nonex­ clusive licence to store, display or copy any or all of the thesis, in all forms of media, for use within the University, and to make the thesis freely available online to other persons or organisations. I do not wish to place any restriction on access to this work. The research presented and reported in this thesis was conducted in accordance with the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) National Statement on Eth­ ical Conduct in Human Research, 2007. The research study proposal received human research ethics approval from the JCU Human Research Ethics Committee, Approval Number H5033. Junwei Bai i Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been finished without the kindness and generosity from nu­ merous people in Australia and in my fieldwork location. First and foremost I wish to express my heart­felt gratitude to my primary supervisor, Professor Sasha Aikhenvald, and my secondary supervisor, Professor R. M. W. Dixon, whose four­year supervision and guidance helped me to grow from an ignorant linguis­ tic student to an independent researcher. Sasha’s challenging questions and insightful comments are my continuous sources of inspiration for thesis writing, her diligence and productivity kept me motivated when I felt distressed or did not feel like working, and her enormous dedication and caring to everybody who came to LCRC showed me how offer­ ing oneself to others can win love and respect in return. She was always the first reader of each chapter of this thesis and provided so many comments and suggestions that can almost be listed as the second author. Both Sasha and Bob carefully read the whole thesis after it was finished and provided insightful feedbacks. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Brigitta Flick for her meticulous proof­reading of the whole thesis and light­hearted comments. Without her attentive work this thesis would have been riddled with many more grammatical errors and much harder to read and under­ stand. I am thankful to my interesting and inspiring colleagues of LCRC for discussing issues of linguistics and sharing their ideas with me. They are Dr. Alex Walker, Nathan White, Pema Wangdi, Dr. Elena Mihas, Firew Girma Worku, Kasia Wojtylak, Dr. Luca Ciucci, Robert Bradshaw, and Christoph Holz. Also, many thanks to the excellent administrative work done by our research assistant, Dave Ellis, who saved me lots of time and made my life and study at LCRC easier. ii iii I am also grateful to my landlord, Mr Ludwig Tengler, for taking care of me. It is he who took me to hospital when I was ill, who showed me around when I first came to Australia, who took me to shopping every week, and who talked about politics and beer with me. The people in my fieldwork location offered no less help to me, though in a different manner. I should first of all thank བདེ་ིད་ཡོམས་མཟོན (bde skyid yoms mzon, 德且拥忠) for con­ tacting me and introducing me to a Munya community, where I was able to conduct my fieldwork. I am enormously grateful to my Munya families for accommodating me for a year, who treated me with touching hospitality and truly made me feel at home. They are my uncle ཆམས་སེར(chams ser, 桥生), my aunt ཚ་རིང་་མོ (tshe ring lha mo, 泽仁拉姆), their daugh­ ter and my old sister ལ་བཟང་ཆོས་ོལ (skal bzang chos sgrol, 格桑曲珠), and her daughter, also my best Munya friend, ཏིང་ཇིན་ོལ་དཀར (ting jin skrol dkar, 丁真珠呷). I am particularly thankful to my uncle, who not only took every measure to ensure that I live comfortably in his house, but also patiently taught me Munya and painstakingly helped me with transcription. Almost everybody that I met in the field taught me Munya or broadened my knowledge on Munya culture one way or the other. The full list would be too long to give so I only mention the most important ones. Grandma མོ་སེད (mo sed, 穆瑟) taught me Munya, helped me with transcription, and treated me like her son; her husband, Grandpa ོ་བཟང (blo bzang, 吕扎), told me about his life stories; Grandpa དཔལ་ི (dpal gyi, 贝吉) told me two wonderful Munya stories; Uncle སོད་ནམ་དབང་འག (sod nam dbang ndug, 四郎汪堆) helped me a lot with transcription; ཤེས་རབ་དབང་ག (shes rab dbang phyug, 喜饶旺秋) took me to the southern dialect area; and the respectable Geshe ཙ་རིང་དབང་ག (tshe ring dbang phyug, 泽仁旺秋) taught me Munya, Tibetan and Buddhism. I am sincerely grateful to these people and those whom I did not mention here. My four­year study and life in Australia would, of course, be impossible without sub­ stantial financial support. This is why I want to show my deep thankfulness to James Cook University for offering me the JCU Postgraduate Research Scholarship and providing me with the Minimal Resources Plan. Thanks to these funding I was able to focus on my study without any concern. Finally, I devote my gratefulness to my families for their ever­lasting support, under­ standing, encouragement, and love, without which I would never have made this far on my academic path. Statement of the Contribution of Others Nature of Assistance Contribution Names, Titles and Affiliations of Co­Contributors Proposal writing Dist Prof Aikhenvald, Prof Dixon (JCU), com­ ments from Dist Prof Aikhenvald, Prof Dixon, Dr Overall (JCU) Data Analysis Dist Prof Aikhenvald, Prof Dixon, Dr Brigitta Flick (Editorial Assistant) Intellectual support Editorial assistance Dist Prof Aikhenvald, Prof Dixon, Dr Brigitta Flick (Editorial Assistant) Participation in Interna­ Jolene Overall (Editorial Assistant) (JCU) tional events and ensu­ ing publications Fee offset/waiver Fee waiver granted by JCU Research costs Research funded through MRP policy JCU and competitive grants under the name of Dist Prof Financial support Aikhenvald as CI (ARC, DAAD); equipment funded through RIBG and RSP funds Stipend JCU PRS scholarship Organization of travel, Administrative Assistants of the LCRC, Ms Logistical support preparation for field­ Amanda Parsonage and Mr David Ellis (LCRC) work, and acquittals Research assistance Assistance of native speakers of Munya while Data collection in the field (as stated in the Acknowledgements) (Munya communities) iv Abstract This is a reference grammar of Munya, a Tibeto­Burman language spoken in the western part of Sichuan province in China. The data that this thesis draws from were collected during a one­year immersion fieldwork and are analyzed within the framework of Basic Linguistic Theory. This study covers the core aspects of the language, including phonetics and phonology, morphology, word classes, grammatical categories, clause structures, and discourse and pragmatics. Munya has a fairly large phoneme inventory, with forty consonants and thirteen vow­ els. The language has a binary tonal contrast, a high tone and a low tone, and the two tones constitute a range of patterns. Morphological processes in Munya include cliticiza­ tion, affixation, reduplication and vowel alternation. The language has a wide variety of vowel harmonies. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are open word classes and there are in addition eight closed classes. The major syntactic function of nouns is to function as arguments. They can take numeral classifiers and plural markers. The major syntactic function of verbs is to act as predicates. Most verbs can be morphologically analyzed as consisting of a root and a directional prefix. There are altogether seven directional pre­ fixes in Munya. Verbs show person­number inflection and derivations of causative and pluractionality. The predominant person­number inflectional paradigm is first person sin­ gular, second person singular, and first or second person non­singular. Adjectives can modify nouns and function as predicates, and tend to be inherently reduplicated. There are ten cases in Munya. Core syntactic functions can be marked by the ergative case i, the absolutive case (in zero form), the genitive case ɣɛ, the dative case le and the ex­ periential case ɣɛ. The patterns of alignment are different for different types of verbs. For control verbs, the pattern is basically ergative­absolutive, and for non­control verbs, v vi the pattern is consistently nominative­accusative. There are three aspects, which are the stative aspect, the perfective aspect and the imperfective aspect. There are also three evidential markers, which are the direct evidential, the indirect evidential and the reported evidential. There are two egophorics in Munya. ŋo can only be used in context of first or second person subject and control predicate. nyi can occur with all persons and all types of predicates.