{"id":498,"date":"2010-05-15T10:00:20","date_gmt":"2010-05-15T08:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=498"},"modified":"2010-03-09T10:48:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-09T08:48:00","slug":"the-tujia-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=498","title":{"rendered":"The Tujia language"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Tujia <\/strong>language. <\/strong>By Cecilie Brassett<\/strong>, Philip Brassett<\/strong>, and Meiyan Lu<\/strong>. (Languages of the world\/materials 455.) Munich: Lincom Europa, 2006. Pp. 218. ISBN 9783895869952<\/a>. $110.50.<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Wolfgang Schulze<\/strong><\/a>, University of Munich<\/em><\/p>\n

Tujia is spoken by roughly one percent of the eight million ethnic Tujia people who live in the center of the Hunan, Hubei, and Guizhou Provinces as well as in the Chongqing Municipality of Central China. The Tujia people are often associated with the ancient kingdom of the Ba people (600\u2013316 BC). Tujia is the most northeasterly language in the Tibeto-Burman language family; however, the exact place of Tujia within this language family is a matter of dispute. Tujia language<\/em> is the first comprehensive description of this highly endangered language, which will help to define more accurately the language\u2019s place in the genetics of Tibeto-Burman.<\/p>\n

Because Tujia is an isolating language, this volume concentrates on lexical and syntactic issues. The data stem from fieldwork carried out in 2002 and 2003. The book begins with a brief description of the Tujia speech community, before turning to phonology. In Ch. 2, the authors argue that the phonology of Tujia is very similar to that of the local Chinese dialects. Because of the prevalence of consonant-vowel (CV) syllables, the section on phonology focuses on onsets and rhymes. Additionally, the authors cautiously describe Tujia\u2019s tonal system along with tone sandhi phenomena, which frequently occurs with classifiers and particles.<\/p>\n

Ch. 3 turns to aspects of the Tujia lexicon, illustrating word structure, types of compounding, and the derivational affixes that separate the Tujia lexicon into semantic fields. Additionally, the authors illustrate examples of reduplication and borrowing (mainly from Chinese).<\/p>\n

Ch. 4 presents Tujia\u2019s lexical categories: mainly nouns, verbs, numerals, classifiers, adverbs, (rare) conjunctions, and interjections as well as an impressive collection of particles.<\/p>\n

The rest of the book is devoted to syntax, and the authors adopt a functional, usage-based approach. Ch. 5 addresses global aspects of sentence structure such as topic prominence, the basic word order (subject-object-verb), and the basic sentence types (e.g. copular, existential, interrogative, imperative). The authors characterize noun phrases and verb phrases, devoting separate chapters (Ch. 6 and Ch. 7, respectively) to each of these domains. The authors pay special attention to the use of the associative particle nie<\/em>3<\/em><\/sup>, which relates two referents in very general terms (e.g. possessive and relative). The bulk of the chapter on verbs deals with verbal particles, which encompass a wide range of modal and aspectual features (as well as directionality, negation, and relevance).<\/p>\n

Ch. 8, which focuses on nominalization and relativization, returns to patterns of word formation, already introduced in Ch. 3. Ch. 9 includes a presentation of clause linking and special construction types (e.g. concurrence, instrumental, causative, sequential). The grammatical description ends with a brief discussion of pronouns in discourse (e.g. zero anaphor and the question of the third person singular). The appendix includes a list of approximately 1,500 thematically arranged lexical entries as well as three texts (one story and two songs, fully glossed and translated). The necessarily brief bibliography represents a complete list of references on the Tujia language (including Chinese publications).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Tujia language. By Cecilie Brassett, Philip Brassett, and Meiyan Lu. (Languages of the world\/materials 455.) Munich: Lincom Europa, 2006. Pp. 218. ISBN 9783895869952. $110.50. Reviewed by Wolfgang Schulze, University of Munich Tujia is spoken by roughly one percent of the eight million ethnic Tujia people who live in the center of the Hunan, Hubei, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=498"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":499,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498\/revisions\/499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}