Linguists tend to believe that total complexity of human languages is invariable. In order to test this hypothesis empirically, we need to calculate the complexity in different domains of language structure: phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. In this paper I provide some guidelines for documenting tonal systems and evaluating their complexity. I…

Karbi is a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language spoken by half a million people in the Karbi Anglong district in Assam, Northeast India, and surrounding areas in the extended Brahmaputra Valley area. It is an agglutinating, verb-final language. This dissertation offers a description of the dialect spoken in the hills of the Karbi Anglong district. It is…

The purpose of the dissertation is to examine Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of a syntax-dependent phonological rule Tone 3 Sandhi (T3S). A Tone 3 (low dipping tone) is changed to a Tone 2 (mid rising tone) when it is followed by another Tone 3. Application of T3S in fact involves a complex process. In setting up the prosodic domains…

First language (L1) attrition research focuses on syntactic and morphological deterioration in environments where L1 "attriters" rarely have contact with their L1, such as immigrants. There is no study that investigates L1 attrition in tones and in contexts where L1 can still be often heard. This study examines this attrition type in…

This dissertation is a grammar of Rena (ISO bez), a Bantu language spoken in southwestern Tanzania by approximately 600,000 people. Bena is largely undocumented, and though aspects of Bena grammar have been described, there is no usable, detailed treatment of the Bena language. Therefore the goal of this dissertation is provide the first detailed…

A DESCRIPTION OF THE GBAYA PEOPLES LIVING IN THE DISTRICT OF BOSSANGOA IN THE NORTHWESTERN PART OF THE CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC IS PRESENTED IN THE INTRODUCTION TO THIS COMPREHENSIVE STUDY OF THE GBAYA LANGUAGE. (THE LANGUAGE IS SPELLED VARIOUSLY BEA, GBEA, AND GBAYA.) IN THREE SECTIONS, THE FIRST PART OF THE TEXT DEALS WITH THE PHONOLOGY AND…

The traditional division of the Chinese syllable into initial, final, and tone is examined. Distributional criteria are used to justify this analysis as more applicable to the Cantonese syllable than strict segmental analysis. A detailed analysis of the Cantonese final is given and implications for cross-language analyses are discussed. (CHK)

An analysis of tone in language begins with the observation that the structural approach taken in segmental phonology, analyzing complex tones in terms of sequences of level tones, is not necessarily appropriate with tone languages. A different approach is proposed, a "dynamic-tone" theory that represents tone contours entirely in terms…

These papers were written as supporting documents for a colloquium on the Vietnamese language. The first catalogues and analyzes Vietnamese vowels, diphthongs, consonants and tones. The second analyzes some facets of Vietnamese syntax. (CHK)

This volume, a collection of selected papers from the Conference on African Languages and Linguistics organized by the Department of Linguistics of the University of Illinois and held at Urbana-Champaign on April 24-25, 1970, contains: W. E. Welmers, "The Typology of the Proto-Niger-Kordofanian Noun Class System"; D. Dalby, "A…

Discusses Tone sandhi, the tone changes undergone by tone-bearing syllables in juxtaposition, in several Chinese dialects. The tone group is examined as a syntatico-semantic unit in Fuzhou and Mandarin and as a syntactic boundary-marker in Shanghai and Xiamen. The theoretical and pedagogical implications are discussed. (20 references) (JL)

This document describes the Shanghai dialect of Chinese. An introduction to the paper provides information on previous research on the dialect. Items covered in the phonological description include syllable structure, initials, finals, tones, tone change, and differences in initials and finals in the colloquial and literary forms. The morphemes of…

This document describes the Wen-ch'ang and Ting-an dialects of Chinese. Items covered in the phonological description of Wen-ch'ang include syllable structure, initials, finals, tones, tone change, and differences in the initials and finals in colloquial and literary forms. Initials, finals, and tones in the Ting-an dialect are also discussed. The…

This document provides a description of the Teng-xian dialect of Chinese. In the introduction, the author discusses the geographical location of the dialect and its relationship to other Chinese dialects; a map is provided. Items covered in the phonological description include syllable structure, initials, finals, tones, tone sandhi, combinations…

Summarizes 10 presentations made at the workshop on a variety of topics including: classification of Chinese dialects; the importance of semantic units in tone sandhi; insights on Chinese character recognition among brain-damaged patients; and a cognitive approach to the study of Chinese grammar. (TR)