Ann Arbor : State University of New York at Buffalo, 2015.
Pages:
674
Language:
English
Abstract:
This dissertation is a descriptive grammar of Xong, a language belonging to the Miao branch of the Miao-Yao family. Xong has approximately 900,000 speakers, the vast majority of whom live in Hunan and Guizhou Provinces in south-central China. In particular, this description concentrates on several fully mutually intelligible Xong varieties spoken in Fenghuang County, located in the far west of Hunan Province. The author uses basic linguistic theory as his main theoretical framework, and this dissertation thus provides a more or less straightworward description of the language’s phonological and grammatical systems with minimal emphasis on theoretical formalisms. In producing this description, the author primarily relied on the fieldwork data he collected over a period of ten (non-consecutive) months in Fenghuang County, although he also made use of many of the previously published Chinese-language descriptions of Xong. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this work is the first full-length English-language grammar of any Miao language.