The Three Guanzhai Yi Reference Syntax

According to some principles on language description and researches which are proposed by reference grammar, this dissertation, based on the typological research achievements, makes a comprehensive and systematic study on San Guan Sub-dialect, a branch of eastern dialect of the Yi language, mainly discussing its phonological system, morphology and syntactic system. It consists of nine chapters.Chapter one is composed of two sections:the design of the dissertation and a short description of the village of San Guan. The first section introduces the theories and methods, the corpus source of San Guan Yi-language and so on. On the basis of a general review on the former linguistic researches, this paper advances the significance and importance on researching the San Guan Yi-language. The second section describes the geographical position and the history of San Guan, and the actual situation of Yi-language use is also introduced.Chapter Two describes the initials, finals, tonic types and syllable canon of the San Guan Yi-language (SGYL). And tonic variations are also tentatively referred.Chapter Three makes a presentation of word-building process of the language, namely, single-morpheme and compounding words The single-morpheme words are divided into three categories:monosyllable, disyllable and polysyllable. Compounding words consists of compound, superposition and affixation.Chapter Four is something about parts of speech and it is made up of twelve sections which describe such parts of speech as noun, pronoun, numeral, quantifier, verb, adjective, auxiliary, adverb, preposition, conjunction, particle, and interjection respectively. Each section not only describes the grammatical features of those words but also does some research on some words in the close word-classes. Special attention is also paid to the aspects of verbs in this chapter. SGYL is made up of seven sorts of aspects which are perfect, perfective, telicity, inceptive, progressive, continuous and comitative. Meanwhile, the types of adverbs and grammatical function of single adverb are described particularly. The prepositions are not only completely described one by one in the chapter and the processes of their grammaticalizations are also described by comparing their difference on synchronic state of their meanings. Besides, this chapter describes categories of particles and their syntactic functions.Chapter Five is a description on the phrasal structure of SGYL The structure is divided into six parts which are coordinate phrases, modifier-noun phrases, narrative-object phrases, verb- complement phrases, subject-predicate phrases, and "bu13" or "x(?)33" phrases.Chapter six, Chapter Seven and Chapter Eight concentrate upon syntactic aspects of the language. Starting from sentence components (Chapter Six), the dissertation goes all the way through simple sentence types (Chapter Seven) to complex sentence types (Chapter Eight). Chapter Seven gives a full description of verb sentences, adjective sentences, noun sentences, subject-predicate sentences, comparative sentences, topic sentences and so on. The Parts of comparative sentences and topic sentences are paid more attentions to, in comparative sentences from their constitutes to word orders, and in topic sentences from marker topic sentences to non-marker topic sentences. Chapter Eight puts stress on complex sentence of coordination and subordinate structure types, namely,and-coordinate,but-coordinate, or-coordinate, continue-coordinate and conditional clauses, causal clauses, purpose clauses, concessive clauses, temporal clauses, etc. Chapter nine is description on mood types of sentences. The structure is divided into four parts which are declarative sentences, interrogative sentences, imperative sentences and exclamatory sentences.On the basis of the study, we have got a comprehensive and deep understanding on SGYL. From the aspect of phonetics, the plosives or affricates of initial consonants in prenasalized stops in SGYL have the tendency of devoicing. Initial consonants of affricates behind the tip of the tongue are changing towards affricates in front of the apex of the tongue. Most of glottal stops have disappeared. From the aspect of lexical formation, it is a long history for SGYL to borrow some words from Han Chinese characters. Not only some new-born matters but also function words such as auxiliaries, aspects of auxiliaries and so on have borrowed from Han Chinese characters. So, the competitive situation between Chinese loanwords and SGYL local words has existed. From the aspect of inflection, it is almost disappearing for SGYL to express Causative inflection through voiced and voiceless opposition of initial consonants and the opposition between actuation and automation has only been left. From the aspect of Overlapping words, except that separate overlapping quantifiers can express common indication, most quantifiers can not overlap. Verbs and adjectives can overlap to express interrogation. From the aspect of sentence order, Adjectives acting as attributes scan be put not only behind the qualified words but also in front of qualified words. Demonstrative pronoun, quantifier, quantity phrases and indicating phrases acting as attributes can be put in front of qualified words. There are two syntax positions for adverbs acting as adverbial modifiers. Some of adverbs can only be in front of predicates and some are only behind predicates. From the aspect of parts of speech, position words in SGYL contain postposition, preposition and framing position words. Those preposition words belong to innate words of SGYL. The type of OV sentence has played a significant part on the study of linguistic typology and language contact. Auxiliary words in attribute head structure is divided into leading and describing words which are very different from each other and can't be confused. According to above features, SGYL not only has the typical features of typology but also has the features of other Yi dialects. Meanwhile SGYL has some special features different from other Yi dialects and untypical typology,and it is a valuable Yi language to for us to study. On the discussion of the above features, the SGYL has both typical and non-typical typological characteristics of analysis-type SOV language. It is strongly expected that the present study will be helpful to the further research of the SGYL and beneficial to the contrastive research and typological study of the Sino-Tibetan family.