Sarah Language Form Research

Under the framework of Bernard Comrie and Norval Smith’s "Lingua Descriptive Studies Questionnaire", this dissertation describes the Salar morphology within the aspect of variations of the world’s languages. At the same time, it also refers to the theory and methods of the traditional grammar especially the works of the Turkic language studies, and the priority of this grammar description and analyse is to highlight the Salar language’s own morphological features. This work takes the language, mostly spoken by the Salars from Altiuli街子of the Xunhua Salar Autonomous County in Qinghai, as the specific research object. It consists of8chapters.Chapter1is the introduction. It introduces the object, purpose, meaning, guidance and the methods of this research, and how the materials referred in this work is collected; it briefly reviews on the previous works about the Salar morphology, explains the Salar writing system used in this paper; it also gives a introduction about the geographical environment where the Salars live, the origin of the Salars, their social organizations and culture, and the language use among them..Chapter2deals with the Nouns. It describes the expression means of the Salar nominal phrase’s attribute, for example, agglutinative affixes, aggllutinative particles, pospositions, orders, processes of the dervied word formation, and so on; the morpnological forms of the syntactic functions like subjects, objects, complements, topics and focuses; the related components in the infinitival structures like the "absolute" strutures, the infinitive and the gerund; the means expressing the semantic function of space and time; the categories of case, number, gender, classifier, difiniteness and indefiniteness; the means of the nominal formation like the derivation, the compound and the reduplication.Chapter3discusses the prouns. It describes position of the pronouns, its compulsion and option, its usges in a contras or emphasis sentence and in a specific question sentence; the person and the number of a comman pronoun, the features of the special pronoun co, the combination between pronouns and numerals; the number, the case and the function of a interrogatory pronoun, and its combination with the numerals; the formation of indefinite pronouns, and the usages of bir, sen, kis and kisi; the features of the reflexive pronouns, the reciprocal pronouns, the possessive pronouns, the demonstrative pronouns, the positive pronouns and the negative pronouns; discuses the usage and the origin of diu and su in great details.Chapter4analyzes the verb. It discuses the voice of the verbs like the basic form, the reflexive, the causative and the cooperative-reciprocal; discusses whether there is a passive voice in Salar; describes the mood of indicative, conditional and imperative (optative), the means of tense and aspect of a verb, the modality and evidentiality of a verb; the features of nonfinite verbs like verbal adjectives, gerunds and verbal adverbs; the formation of verbs.Chapter5deals with the adjectives. It classifies the adjectives, discusses its formations, the compound and the reduplication of the adjectives; the categories of the adjectives, such as the base form, the comparative, the superlative and the excessive; and the features of the nominalization of adjectives.Chapter6is about the numerals and the classifiers. It introduces the cardinal numbers, the ordinal numbers, the collective numbers, the approximate numbers, the fractions, and the situation of numerals in current Salar; and it also discusses the classifiers.Chapter7is about the indeclinable word classes. It describes the adverbs of time, frequency, degree and manner; the postpositions combined with the allative, the elative, the nominative and the instrumental, and the origin of postpositions; the coordinative conjunctions, the selective conjunctions and the disjunctive conjunctions; the modal particles and its interrogative, emphasizing, imperative and other functions; the features of exclamatory particles and the onomatopoeias.Chapter8is the conclusion. Compared with other Turkic languages, it summarizes some unique features of the Salar language:the definiteness and indefiniteness of the Salar nominal phrases; the binary system of the verbal evedentiality; position of the numerals in a sentence, means of expressing the collective numerals and the endangermnt of the Salar numerals; the superlative of adjectives; features of some special pronouns like co; the morphological features preserved in Salar; some features existed in other Turkic languages are absent in Salar; some Persian prefixes and other affixes, the negative suffix-sXz, the person of verbs, and the distinction of singulars and plurals of the nominal possessive suffixes are shared by Uyghur and many other Turkic languages, but they do not exist in Salar, even in some areas, the Salar nominal possessive suffixes have already disappeared.Since the Salars left from the Central Asia’s Turkic-speaking center and came to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in13th century, the Salar language has been developing in a unique way. It preserves many Old Turkic elements which are importance of reconstructing the history of the Turkic languages especially the Oghuz language. Meanwhile, the contact with Chinese and Tibetan in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau makes Salar obtain some interesting features which are absent in other Turkic languages. Salar can be said a vivid example of language contact among the Turkic, Chinese and Tibetan. Therefore, it is no doubted that Salar are importance of the linguistic research. However, Salar is already been confirmed an endangered language by the UNESCO, and evidence from Chinese scholars’research shows that the future of the Salar languages is not optimistic too. There are lots of works to do to preserve, document and study this language. And this dissertation, based on many years’ fieldwork in Salar areas and comparison among Salar and other related languages, does a deep and precise description about the Salar morphology in some degree, hoping make a contribution to the preservation and the study of the Salar language.