A Grammar of Kua'nsi

Abstract

Kua'nsi (ISO 639-3: ykn) is a Central Nwgi (or Yi) language spoken by approximately 5000 speakers in Liuhe Town, Heqing County, Dali Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan Province, China. In addition to Kua'nsi, there are four other Ngwi groups in Heqing: Kuamasi, Zibusi, Laizisi and Sonaga (Castro, Crook and Flaming 2010). All these Ngwi groups are classified as part of the Yi nationality. They had not been recognised as distinct groups within Yi until recently and their languages had not been studied in any detail.

This thesis provides the first comprehensive description of various aspects of Kua'nsi and is a first step to revealing the linguistic history of the Ngwi groups in the region. The thesis aims to describe Kua'nsi in its own right by using the language-internal descriptive categories that are informed by cross-linguistic typology. The goal of the description is to build a unique working system of Kua'nsi that is also comparable with other languages.

The description and analysis in this thesis are data-oriented and based on spontaneous Kua'nsi speech collected during six months of 'in-person' fieldwork followed by remote fieldwork during the COVID-19 pandemic. A large multimedia corpus was developed with the audio and video recordings with accompanying annotation, including transcription, interlinear glossing, translation and grammatical coding of the spontaneous data. This lays the foundation for a comprehensive analysis of Kua'nsi and allows an in-depth look at the overall language system.

Kua'nsi people used to be bilingual in Heqing Bai, another minority language of the region. Bai people are the major ethnic group in Heqing County making up over 90 per cent of the local population and as such Kua'nsi people were in everyday contact with them. As Mandarin Chinese has become the more socially prominent language in many domains, it has replaced the Bai language as the second language for most Kua'nsi young people, although they may still develop varying degrees of proficiency in Bai. Consequently, there is a substantial amount of lexical borrowing from Chinese and Bai in Kua'nsi. However, the change in the pattern of bilingualism over time means that the borrowings from Bai are phonologically more integrated into Kua'nsi than those from Chinese.

Kua'nsi has 33 consonants, seven vowels and three tones. Kua'nsi vowels feature a distinction in laryngeal register (lax vs. tense vowels). Words are mostly monomorphemic and present very limited morphological derivations, among which reduplication is the most productive and is utilized for different morphosyntactic purposes. Nouns are often followed by different postposed modifiers including adjectives, nominalised constructions, demonstratives, numerals, classifiers and articles, although a limited set of preposed modifiers is possible. Serial verb constructions are common, and verbs are followed by various particles including aspectual, associated motion, directional, causative, valency-increasing, and augmentative particles. Kua'nsi has a large set of sentence-final particles that denote evidentiality, engagement and expectedness, i.e. the epistemic status of interlocutors. The meaning of these particles is complex and multi-dimensional.

Arguments of different grammatical roles (S, A and P) can all be marked by the case marking clitic. SV/APV is the canonical constituent order which is statistically prominent in discourse while the constituent order shows a great degree of flexibility. Topic-comment structure and zero anaphora are frequent and create gaps in utterances whose interpretation highly relies on the context.