The Hani people and language Previous linguistic work on Hani

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1.1 The Hani people and language

There are approximately 1.3 million people belonging to the Chinese government- recognized minority called the Hani Dai and Duan 1994:1. The Hani live in southwestern Yunnan province, primarily in the Honghe Hani-Yi Autonomous Prefecture, the Simao Prefecture, the Xishuangbanna Prefecture, and the Yuxi Prefecture Lewis and Bai 2002:2. There are also Hani speakers living in Vietnam and Laos loc. cit.. The Hani language belongs to the Loloish branch of the Lolo-Burmese subgroup of the Tibeto-Burman family of languages. Chinese linguists have divided the Hani into three major dialect groups: the Hani- Yani dialect, the Haoni-Baihong dialect, and the Biyue-Kudao dialect Dai and Duan 1994:5. It is widely recognized that speakers of dialects for different branches cannot communicate effectively with one another loc. cit.. The government-recognized standard for all varieties of Hani is the Dolnia sub-dialect, which belongs to the Hani- Yani group and is the variety spoken in Lüchun county, Honghe Prefecture, Yunnan, as its standard Lewis and Bai 2002:2. The written texts used for this study follow this standard. The Hani orthography was developed in 1957 and is used in a number of books, pamphlets, and newspapers. Hani syllables are of the form CV, and the letters q, l, and f syllable-finally designate low, high, and rising tones, respectively. The rising tone only occurs with words borrowed from Chinese. Syllables written without tone marking are mid tone. The letter v, after a vowel, indicates that the syllable is to be pronounced with glottalization. Some consonants are designated by digraphs. 3 The data cited in this thesis are written in the 1957 orthography, and I have retained the punctuation from the original printed versions.

1.2 Previous linguistic work on Hani

There are a number of helpful works on Hani linguistics which have made this study possible and greatly facilitated my own acquisition of Hani. The Chinese grammars which guided this study include the following: Li and Wang 1984. This overview discusses the phonology of Hani and provides a sketch of the word classes, phrase structures, and dialects of the language. The appendices include four Hani texts. Li 1990. This work describes the etymology of Hani words and then goes on to classify them into ten parts of speech, describing the functions of each one. A description of phrase and sentence structures is provided. The appendix includes the narrative, “The Dragon and the Son-in-Law,” extracts of which are cited in this thesis. Dai and Duan 1994. This book includes an overview of the languages related to Hani and the recognized dialects of Hani itself. Xu 2007. This book provides information related to Hani cultural themes, folk songs, sayings, incantations, and other areas of anthropology. It also provides an overview of constructions used in Hani to perform discourse functions. The two bilingual reference dictionaries that guided my glossing were Dai et al 2000 and Lewis and Bai 1995. Translations of quotations from Chinese sources in this paper are my own. 4 Because the specific functions of many grammatical particles in Hani have yet to be described in sufficient detail, the terms and abbreviations I use in the interlinearized glosses are tentative.

1.3 Definition of terms