A Systemic Functional Typological Study Of The Bai Clause

The Bai language is used by the Bai ethnic minority people inhabited in southwest China, and it belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family, Yi-Burman language group. The linguistic forms of the Bai language are notably characterized by its complexity, and it bears the traces left by both Chinese and Yi-Burmese, with 70 % of its vocabulary cognate with or borrowed from the Middle Chinese. It has been a fiercely-contested issue for nearly a century what language branch the Bai language should be subsumed under, mostly because of the complexity in its typological features. The evidences from morphology, syntax and other perspectives do not suffice to answer the question.Clause is an important gateway to determine the type of a language in terms of Systemic Functional Typology(henceforth, SFT), which is built upon the fundamental ideas of Systemic Functional Linguistics(henceforth, SFL). The SFT study basically applies Systemic Functional Grammar(henceforth, SFG) to natural language description. With the systems of Theme, Mood and Transitivity as the starting points and plenty of parameters involved in, like the choices of systems to realize linguistic functions in the form of certain structure, a study of clauses from the SFT perspective may enrich the research methods of contemporary linguistic typology.Aiming at universals and variations of languages, general linguistic typology divides language types in accordance with the morphological types and the word order types. By contrast, SFT describes languages from three simultaneous expression levels and has inter-lingual comparison of the choices of structural elements in realizing the clause configuration. Halliday views language as the construing tool of human experiences in context. His ideas as well as other SFL theories will be utilized in the analysis and the description of the Bai clause. Its integrated and systematic perspective focuses on the semantics of discourse acts in the context, describes the language from the perspective of the origin of meaning, and furthers the descriptions from three parallel levels, which treats a language as a diversified system. Therefore, SFT enriches the approaches to the contemporary linguistic typology.The development of SFT has reached the stage of refinement of its theories. In the early developing stage of SFL, Halliday carried out the description of Chinese, English and other Asian languages. The typical work of SFT Language Typology:A Functional Perspective edited by Caffarel et. al. published in 2004 includes the description of eight languages and it briefly summarizes the research methods and purpose of SFT. On the International Conference on Functional Language Typology in Shanghai in December of 2015, it was reported that hundreds of languages in the world had been described in SFT, which has formed the language database to a large extent.The present dissertation focuses on the description of a single language and that of its inter-lingual comparison as well. To be specific, this study describes the metafunctions of the Bai clause from the perspective of SFT with three objectives:(1) to provide a new perspective of interpreting the characteristic and the three metafunctions of the Bai clause for the reader; 2) to provide a new introduction to the Bai clause for readers who know little about the Bai language; 3) to add a new language sample to the language repertoire of SFT.This research reveals the general features of all languages and the special characteristics of a peculiar language, i.e. the Bai language. First of all, the analysis of the Theme system indicates that the interpersonal Theme comes before the circumstantial Adjunct and the Subject if there is one. When the clause has a textual Theme, the sequence is “textual theme + interpersonal theme + ideational theme”, which is almost the case with that in English and Chinese.In the Bai language, the textual Themes are realized by Conjunctive Adjuncts. The interpersonal Themes are realized by vocatives, interjections and comment Adjuncts. Most of the Modal Adjuncts are put at the clause’s final position to realize tense and polarity as well as Mood types. Besides, a few Adjuncts are in the neighborhood of the main verb to indicate its tense or voice.The topical themes are realized by the Subject, the Circumstantial Adjunct, the Complement, the thematized clause, the Predicator in an imperative, or the Predicator in the Subject-omitted indicative, etc. In short, the textual theme and the interpersonal theme are optional, but the topical theme is obligatory, yet it may be absent but recoverable in the context of the discourse. Besides, the frequency of the co-occurrence of the three kinds of Themes is rather low in our text analysis and counting. Halliday concludes that there are a group of languages with low tolerance for multiple Themes. We find that the Bai language is not rich in multiple Theme structures. The Subject in the Bai clause is often absent in the discourse. It is normal to see the absence of the Subject in indicatives in the Bai language, especially in the dialogic context. Such omission, however, does not cripple the delivery of the meaning.The Adjuncts in the Bai language play a critical role in the Textual and Interpersonal metafunctions. The Adjuncts in the Bai language serve as the function of the Finite in English. With the aid of the Adjuncts, the Mood types are indicated; with them other interpersonal functions are realized. The clause ending Modal Adjuncts realize the tense and polarity. Besides, the Adjuncts in the neighborhood of the main verb indicate the aspect or voice of the process, which is a common characteristic in southeastern Asian languages. Negation is realized either in lexical changes or in grammatical devices. There are pairs of antonymic verbs or adverbs in the Bai central dialect, and the irregular configuration of a few pairs realizes negation by reinforcing the negation, and the constructions of double negation realize the negation rather than defy it. In the serial verb construction, the negative adverb either precedes the first verb or stands at the end of the clause.Other interpersonal functions are realized via the choice of different pronouns, in particular, the second singular pronoun. Besides, the choice of the nominal measure indicates the speaker’s attitude and the social distance are manipulated in marginal honorification and the degree of omission, etc.The Experiential metafunction of Bai clauses is manifested in the distribution of the types of processes and the choices of the configuration of each process. Thematized linguistic units are marked with the auxiliary no33 or v??. In the division of the processes, existential process and relational process are used frequently to construe static experiences.Generally, if a clause has a serial verb construction as the Predicator, the type of the clause is determined by the main verb. If it is a clause with projection, we judge the type as a mental process. A verbal process often has a verbiage, which is frequently realized with another major or minor clause. In the existential process, the Existent is located after the main verb. For example, the complement in material clauses is often shifted before the Actor, after the circumstantial element.Circumstance priority manifests one feature that time and space are the first two elements in the cognition of the Bai people. In Bai clauses the circumstantial elements always precede any other topical theme. Through spatio-temporal circumstantial elements, together with Modal adjuncts, temporality of the Bai clause is manifested. This interprets the fact that the circumstantial element constantly starts a Bai clause if only it has one, whether for time or for space.Particular features are investigated, like the positions of the participants and the acceptable omission of certain participants. In the Bai clause, the existential process is of a high frequency. In many cases, a clause may contain another embedded clause, which functions as the projection in mental process or the verbiage in verbal process. In imperatives, complements are often lifted before the predicator, and normally the Subject is absent.The research verifies the application of SFG description to the Sino-Tibetan languages. We find most of the parameters are applicable, only with a few exceptions. For example, double layer analysis should be adopted in the analysis of complex clauses of the Bai language. It is found that the components of theme are rich both in number and in choices in the Bai clause. Take the theme choice as an example. A Bai clause may start with components like circumstantial elements, the Complement, the Process, or Predicator, etc. When the theme is realized by the Complement, it is often signaled with markers no33 or v55.Adjunct is the main resource for expressing modality in the Bai language. The realization of tense, aspect and voice rely heavily on the use of Adjuncts, only with a few exceptions. Take the negation expression as an example. It has been found that the Bai language shares some universals with languages in Africa, Europe and Asia in the expression of negation, especially in the double negation form.Viewed from the lexicogrammar cline, the grammar of the Bai clause is realized in several ways. Bai language is an analytic language, ancient Yi-Burman language can be found in modern Bai language, for example, some verbs and adverbials show antonyms and negation through morphological change. In addition to the evaluation meaning of common adverbials and adjectives, it is worth mentioning that most of the measures in the Bai language also have the evaluation meaning.The present dissertation contains seven chapters. Chapter 1 provides a brief introduction to the rationale of the research, including the Bai ethnic minority group, the Bai language and its background, the research motivation, the significance, the research objectives as well as the structure of the dissertation. Chapter 2 is the literature review of the Bai language study, the SFT language description, especially the description of natural languages, and the genetic affiliation of the Bai language as an inevitable question in the previous studies of language description. Chapter 3 briefly introduces the theoretical preliminaries of SFL and SFT. SFT description framework links many scattered characteristics to a whole system with subsystems.Chapters 4, 5 and 6 describe the three metafunctions of the Bai language, covering the common features between Bai and Chinese, and those among Bai, Yi and Burmese. Starting with the textual function of language, Chapter 4 mainly describes the theme system. Chapter 5 focuses on the interpersonal function of the Bai clause through the modality system. With transitivity system as the core parameter, Chapter 6 discusses the experiential metafunction with the brief introduction of process types, participants and the choice of language components of other constructional experiences in the Bai clause. Chapter 7 is the summary of the whole dissertation. In this chapter, we discuss the relationship between theory and descriptions; we sum up the findings of the research and the implications prospects for future research on this topic.Focusing on the description of a single language, i.e. the Bai language, the present dissertation launches an inter-lingual study of the comparisons of some typical cases, such as “double negation means negation”. From which we find that diachronic diversities can be found in synchronic corpus in the three dialectal areas of the Bai language. Previous studies focus more on the dialects in the central and southern areas than on the northern part. The reason might be that, on the one hand, the dialect users in the north is rather few, and on the other hand, in the remote location of Nujiang Prefecture which the Lemo Bai dialect users inhabit, there are few Lemo language speakers doing any linguistic research, which leaves a large research space for the Lemo Bai dialect in the future.This study is beneficial to the expanding of the academic horizon in language typology. Language description based on a grammar theory is supposed to verify the applicability of the theoretical system and the improvement, which can enrich and promote the theory, and enhance the generalization and construction of further theories. Although SFT cannot independently determine the genetic belonging of a certain language, it offers us a new perspective to observe a language from different angles. To provide a better answer to such questions as the language family, SFT may take into consideration the research methods of language evolution, language cognition, and historical linguistics. This is a possible target of our research in the future.