Academic literature on the topic 'Lavrung language'

In the Shangzhai dialect of Horpa, an under-studied Tibeto-Burman language of northwestern Sichuan, pervasive phonological alternations occur in the morphological causative formation. This paper applies the study of this phenomenon to the analysis of the historical development of alternative modes of encoding causativity in Horpa and two related rGyalrongic languages: rGyalrong (proper) and Lavrung. Despite bewildering surface variations, Shangzhai Horpa can be analyzed as having a single consistently non-syllabic causative prefix s- which exerts pressure on the already elaborate onset system and triggers multiple phonological adjustments. The excessive allomorphy and constraints exhaust the morphological means of causation coding, leading to the rise of the periphrastic causative construction as the primary causativizing strategy in the language. By contrast, the dominant mode of expressing causativity still rests in the realm of derivational morphology in the other rGyalrongic languages where the old causative prefix *s˙- remains syllabic.

The Rgyalrongic languages (Qiangic branch, Sino-Tibetan family) are prime examples of a split verb agreement system grounded in the pragmatic salience of speech act participants. However, the Horpa language in this group presents a hybrid system involving a more intricate interplay of functional and syntactic factors, despite having less elaborate morphological material than some related languages. Many fundamental issues of Horpa verb agreement remain to be adequately explored, despite preliminary descriptions in the literature. This paper provides a new study of verb agreement in the Gexi variety of Horpa based on first-hand fieldwork data. Compared with Shangzhai Horpa of Rangtang County, Gexi displays many points of difference in its agreement system, including reduplication as a number-marking device, and functionally differentiated special and general sets of person-marking suffixes, the former restricted to transitive singular actants. Gexi verb agreement is undergoing typological transition from pragmatics-driven split agreement to syntax-driven subject agreement, as part of a global morpho-syntactic shift from a head-marking to a dependent-marking grammatical type. The conversion, possibly catalyzed by contact influences from Tibetan, is still ongoing with traces of the original system preserved in the form of alternating patterns. The phenomena under analysis constitute an intermediate stage in the evolution of Qiangic verbal agreement typology between the conservative Rgyalrong, Lavrung, and Shangzhai Horpa split-agreement type and the innovative subject-agreement type observed in Qiang and Prinmi.