THE BASIC STRUCTURE of the ZAIWA NOUN PHRASE Mark Wannemacher Payap University Linguistics Institute 1. INTRODUCTION Zaiwa Is A
Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area Volume 33.2 ― October 2010 THE BASIC STRUCTURE OF THE ZAIWA NOUN PHRASE Mark Wannemacher Payap University Linguistics Institute Abstract This paper provides a basic description of major grammatical features of the Zaiwa noun phrase. It includes a review of Zaiwa phonology, a discussion of word classes and consituent order typology, and a description of the noun phrase including noun types, nominal modifiers, conjunctions and aspects of discourse grammar related to the noun phrase. Keywords grammar, noun phrase, word class, Zaiwa, Tibeto-Burman 1. INTRODUCTION Zaiwa is a language of approximately 150,000 speakers in the Northern Burmic Branch of the Tibeto-Burman language family. It is spoken in parts of Eastern Kachin State and Northern Shan State in Myanmar and in parts of Southwest Yunnan in China. The Zaiwa have a close cultural relationship with the Jinghpaw people and borrow extensively from the Jinghpaw language, as well as from Burmese, Dehong Dai and Yunnanese Chinese. This paper will give a brief introduction to Zaiwa phonology, word classes and constituent order typology, and then move on to the primary focus of describing the Zaiwa noun phrase. The description includes nouns types, pronouns, nominal modifiers including the relative clause, demonstratives, postpositions, conjunctions, and discourse markers. Data for this paper were collected while teaching at Payap University in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I would like to thank Payap University for their kind assistance in the study of the languages of Southeast Asia.1 The grammatical data in this paper is from speakers from Sadon and Kengtung, Myanmar, as well as Janshi, China.
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