A Grammar of Gan Chinese: The Yichun Language

Description

China is very rich in language resources, and Mandarin is undoubtedly its most prestigious and well-known representative. Unfortunately, most of these languages remain understudied or even unstudied. Such is the case of Yichun Gan. Written in the style of a reference grammar, this book sets out to give a comprehensive and systematic description of Yichun grammar, with the aim of increasing readers' knowledge about Chinese languages other than Mandarin. In addition to common categories like nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions, the volume attempts to cover as many grammatical categories and constructions as possible, including the Sinitic-specific categories such as classifiers, the aspect system, postpositions and the object-marking BA constructions. To highlight its uniqueness, the book adopts a comparative perspective to contrast many features of Yichun Gan with Mandarin and other Sinitic languages. Our study shows that Yichun Gan possesses both Northern and Southern Chinese traits in many constructions, which supports its status as a transitional language. It will be of interest to linguists who wish to learn more about East Asian languages, and more specifically Sinitic languages. Acknowledgements Preface List of abbreviations Contents 1. Gan and the Gan People 2. The Yichun sound system 3. Morphology 4. Personal pronouns 5. Possessives 6. Demonstratives 7. Numerals and classifiers 8. Adjectives and adjective phrases 9. Prepositions 10. Postpositions 11. Aspectuality 12. Modality 13. Negation 14. Resultative constructions 15. Ditransitives 16. BA constructions 17. Passives and causatives 18. Topic and focus related constructions 19. Relative clauses 20. Interrogatives 21. Clause linking: coordination and subordination References Index Appendix