A Study Of The Church

Woni is a variety of Hani language, in Yi Branch, Tibeto-Burman Group, Sina-Tibetan Family, spoken by more than 5000 people in Yunnan Province. It is an analytical language. This dissertation offers a comprehensive and in-depth description of the variety spoken in Leda village, Yani district of Xinping County, Yuxi City, from typological and functional perspectives. The dissertation consists of ten chapters.Chapter 1 introduces the geographical distribution and the ethnological background of Woni speakers, the previous researches on the language, the status quo of language use, data collection and research methodology.Chapter 2 introduces phonology system of Woni language, including consonants, vowels, tones, syllables, tone sandhi, and a comparison among Woni varieties of different regions is carried out.Chapter 3 is about words. Basic and traditional words in Woni language are introduced, such as words referring to body parts, organs, costumes, measurement units, seasons, and kinship terms. Particularly, a detailed description is given to word formation. Finally, the loanwords from Yi language and local Chinese are presented.Chapter 4 discusses content words, including nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, numerals, classifiers and adverbs. Detailed description and analysis about semantic and syntactic functions are given to each class. Besides that, some characteristics in some classes are highlighted, such as the number and genders of nouns, the insert of noun or noun phrase between a two syllable demonstrative pronoun, the general reference of interrogative pronouns, the reduplication of adjectives, the same morphology of nouns and verbs,and so on.Chapter 5 studies functional words, including particles, conjunctions, modal particles, and interjections. The syntactical functions of these words are discussed.Chapter 6 mainly introduces morphology markings, such as nominal markings, verbal markings, nominalization markings, causative markings, reflexive markings, passive markings directional markings and so on.Chapter 7 presents phrases. The phrases differ in components and word orders, showing different logical and semantic relationships, such as coordinate, subject-predicate, predicate-object, predicate-complement, serial verbs and appositives.Chapter 8 deals with mood, constituents of simple sentences, and complex sentences. The part of mood presents declarative sentence, imperative sentence, interrogative sentences, and exclamatory sentence. The constituents of simple sentence are subject, predicate, object, attributive, adverbial and complement. The part of complex sentences mainly discusses relative clauses and subordinate clauses.Chapter 9 focuses on the language contact and the decline of Woni language. In the villages of Leda and Chahe, the number of people who can use Woni is dropping, the capability of using the language is reducing, and the domain of using the language is diminishing. Linguistically, there are changes in phonological and grammatical systems, the number of local Han is increasing, and many Woni-Han words appeared. Based on these changes, a conclusion is drawn that Woni language declines promptly and is in the last stage of declining.Chapter 10 studies the classification of Hani dialects and the position of Woni. The phonologies and 100 Swadesh words of Dazhai village in Luchun county, Caiyuan village of Mojiang, Shuigui village of Mojiang and Leda village of Xinping are compared, and the chain changes of some vowels in dialects of these regions are discussed. Lastly, the origins of several consonants only appeared in Woni language are studied.Two corpora are listed in the appendix part, one is the corpus of vocabulary, and the other is corpus of stories and dialogues.This research is of value to the followings:(1) it is urgent to document and describe this endangered language since the number of Woni speakers is few and young people have shifted to local Han.(2) It is helpful in developing insights on synchronic and diachronic features of Woni language.(3) It is valuable on the research of language contact, particularly on loanwords, the changes of sounds and grammar caused by language contact.(4) The documentation of Woni language can not only be available for future generations, but also be helpful in improving Woni people’s awareness of studying and transmitting their language and culture.The innovation of this dissertation is that just a few studies had been done on Woni language, and this research firstly offers a more systematical and in-depth decription by taking first-handed materials from fieldworks, and giving a diachronically discussion about sound changes among four dialects.