Papers by Jackson Tianshin Sun
Sun, Jackson T.-S., 2024
Sichuan has been a region of remarkable ethnolinguistic complexity since ancient times. Nowadays,... more Sichuan has been a region of remarkable ethnolinguistic complexity since ancient times. Nowadays, it is still home to a host of typologically diverse Sino-Tibetan languages. Rife cross-linguistic interactions in this region have brought profound impact to the grammars of the local languages. Drawing on first-hand fieldwork data, this article examines three sets of Sino-Tibetan languages of Sichuan which exhibit morphosyntactic changes respectively under substratum, adstratum, and superstratum contact influences. The participating languages differ in each case (Tibetic Rgyalrong, Rgyalrong Qiang, Horpa Tibetic) but they all underwent varying degrees of structural convergence, leading to innovated inflectional morphology and syntactic patterns, and even altered grammatical profiles. Thus, to adequately explain the grammatical evolution of Sino-Tibetan languages of Sichuan, one must take into account the variegated contact phenomena existing in this area.
The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality, 2018
This chapter presents an overview of salient issues regarding the correlation between evidentiali... more This chapter presents an overview of salient issues regarding the correlation between evidentiality and person. A synthesis of research findings is provided and illustrated by empirical data. The person category relevant for evidentiality is shown to be the ‘speaking person’, which translates into various grammatical persons depending on the grammatical construction. The person-sensitive distribution of evidential forms is attributable to features like control, observability, and access to knowledge, and may be creatively manipulated along an evidential directness cline, such that an evidential value reserved for the speaking person may be employed to assert intimate knowledge about another person, and conversely, a reduced evidential value may be selected in self-reports to tone down first-person involvement, exhibiting ‘first-person effects’. Also elucidated herein is how the addressee’s perspective, another critical person factor in evidentiality, shapes evidential formation and ...
JOURNAL OF CHINESE LINGUISTICS, 2010
Page 1. TONE CATEGORIZATION IN TAIWANESE: A CASE STUDY IN CONCEPT FORMATION Jackson T.S. Sun Aca... more Page 1. TONE CATEGORIZATION IN TAIWANESE: A CASE STUDY IN CONCEPT FORMATION Jackson T.S. Sun Academia Sinica, Taiwan ABSTRACT This study conducts a psycholinguistic experiment using the concept ...
Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 2016
This study explores the phenomenon of uvularization in the vowel systems of two Heishui County va... more This study explores the phenomenon of uvularization in the vowel systems of two Heishui County varieties of Qiang, a Sino-Tibetan language of Sichuan Province, China. Ultrasound imaging (one speaker) shows that uvularized vowels have two tongue gestures: a rearward gesture, followed by movement toward the place of articulation of the corresponding plain vowel. Time-aligned acoustic and articulatory data show how movement toward the uvula correlates with changes in the acoustic signal. Acoustic correlates of uvularization (taken from two speakers) are seen most consistently in raising of vowel F1, lowering of F2 and in raising of the difference F3-F2. Imaging data and the formant structure of [l] show that uvular approximation can begin during the initial consonant that precedes a uvularized vowel. Uvularization is reflected phonologically in the phonotactic properties of vowels, while vowel harmony aids in the identification of plain–uvularized vowel pairs. The data reported in this...
Studies on Sino-Tibetan Languages: Papers in Honor …, 2004
... Jackson T.-S. Sun Academia Sinica The richest verbal system among the rGyalrongic cluster of ... more ... Jackson T.-S. Sun Academia Sinica The richest verbal system among the rGyalrongic cluster of languages in Tibeto-Burman is found in the Showu dialect of rGyalrong. ... Key words:Tibeto-Burman, rGyalrongic, verbal morphology, stem formation 1. Introduction ...
Linguistics of the TIbeto-Burman Area, 2006
The linguistic situation of S\ e'« erb\ a (<gSer.pa>) District at the eastern corner of S\ ed« a ... more The linguistic situation of S\ e'« erb\ a (<gSer.pa>) District at the eastern corner of S\ ed« a County in northwestern Sichuan has long been shrouded in mystery. Recent fieldwork has enabled this author to positively identify two obscure indigenous languages used by the agriculturalist Tibetans residing in the S\ e'« erb\ a area. One of these turns out to be an aberrant, previously undescribed form of Tibetan. This article provides the first linguistic description of gSerpa Tibetan, highlighting some of its striking lexical, phonological and grammatical features.
... 799 Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas, is characterized by abundant derivational as we... more ... 799 Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas, is characterized by abundant derivational as well as inflectional morphology ... in the perfective and imperfective past verb forms, is also required in the low-transitivity continuous aspect (see further on), a variety of converbs, as well ...
Page 1. LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS 4.4:769-836, 2003 2003-0-004-004-000004-1 Phonological Profile o... more Page 1. LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS 4.4:769-836, 2003 2003-0-004-004-000004-1 Phonological Profile of Zhongu: A New Tibetan Dialect of Northern Sichuan* Jackson T.-S. Sun Academia Sinica Zhongu is an obscure ...
Language and linguistics, 2000
... The label Situ, referring to the traditional territory of the four chieftaincies Zhuokeji (WT... more ... The label Situ, referring to the traditional territory of the four chieftaincies Zhuokeji (WT lCog.rtse), Suomo (WT So.mang), Songgang (WT ... Representative local varieties of Lavrung, some very different, include Xiaoyili (WT Yu.nas.chung) and Siyaowu (WT bSu-yo-grong) in ...
Horpa is a major Rgyalrongic language cluster (Qiangic branch, Sino-Tibetan family) spoken in nor... more Horpa is a major Rgyalrongic language cluster (Qiangic branch, Sino-Tibetan family) spoken in northern Sichuan. In Central Horpa, the most widely spoken member in this diverse subgroup, verbal number indexation by way of partial stem reduplication augments vestigial suffixal number marking. This article investigates three Central Horpa varieties where this type of inflectional morphology is attested to a varying degree, and offers an account of its origin, functional distribution, and development across the modern dialects.
Gserskad and Rdoskad are two recently uncovered Tibetic dialect chains spoken on the northern bor... more Gserskad and Rdoskad are two recently uncovered Tibetic dialect chains spoken on the northern border of Rngaba (Aba) and Dkarmdzes (Ganzi) Prefectures in northwestern Sichuan. Despite their many points of difference and only partial intelligibility, Gserskad and Rdoskad show a special affinity to each other, as suggested in Sun 2006. The further idiosyncratic common lexical, phonological, and particularly morphological evidence highlighted in this article vindicate the close ties shared by Gserskad and Rdoskad as a distinct Tibetic language on a par with Amdo.
The Ancestry of the Languages and Peoples of China Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series 29 (2019): 24-43, 2019
Horpa is an understudied, internally diverse Rgyalrongic cluster (Qiangic branch, Sino-Tibetan fa... more Horpa is an understudied, internally diverse Rgyalrongic cluster (Qiangic branch, Sino-Tibetan family) spoken across six counties in two prefectures of northwestern Sichuan. As this author demonstrated in an earlier article using individual-identifying morphological evidence, Northern Horpa (Stodsde) clearly belongs under Rgyalrongic (J. Sun 2000b). The phyloge-netic affinity of less conservative Horpa languages (e.g., Rta'u) is however far less obvious. This paper, drawing on extensive recent fieldwork, offers a fuller range of cross-dialect evidence in important areas of Horpa verbal morphology to vindicate the ancestry of Horpa as a Rgyalrongic subgroup. It is shown that quite banal phonological and grammatical evolutions have caused the innovating Horpa languages to cast off much of their characteristic morphology, masking their true Rgyalrongic origins.
Journal of the International Phonetic Assocation, Aug 2016
This study explores the phenomenon of uvularization in the vowel systems of two Heishui County va... more This study explores the phenomenon of uvularization in the vowel systems of two Heishui County varieties of Qiang, a Sino-Tibetan language of Sichuan Province, China. Ultrasound imaging (one speaker) shows that uvularized vowels have two tongue gestures: a rearward gesture, followed by movement toward the place of articulation of the corresponding plain vowel. Time-aligned acoustic and articulatory data show how movement toward the uvula affects the acoustic signal. Acoustic correlates of uvularization (taken from two speakers) are seen most consistently in raising of vowel F1, lowering of F2 and in raising of the difference F3-F2. Imaging data and the formant structure of [l] show that uvular approximation can begin during the initial consonant that precedes a uvularized vowel. Uvularization is reflected phonologically in the phonotactic properties of vowels, while vowel harmony aids in the identification of plain-uvularized vowel pairs. The data reported in this paper argue in favor of a revision of the catalog of secondary articulations recognized by the International Phonetic Alphabet, in order to include uvularization, which can be marked with the symbol [ʶ] in the case of approximation and [χ] for secondary uvular frication.
Western Horpa (Xinlong County, Ganzi Prefecture) is a member of the Horpa language cluster under ... more Western Horpa (Xinlong County, Ganzi Prefecture) is a member of the Horpa language cluster under the Rgyalrongic subgroup of Qiangic, a branch of the Sino-Tibetan family. This paper analyzes the formation strategies and functional distribution of verb stems in the Jialaxi and Youlaxi dialects of Western Horpa, on the basis of our first-hand fieldwork data. The salient archaisms in Western Horpa stem alternation, identifiable via comparison with parallel morphological phenomena in the conservative Northern Horpa language, provide important clues to the original state of an obscure area of verbal morphology in Common Rgyalrongic.
2017. In G. Thurgood and R. J. LaPolla, Eds. The Sino-Tibetan Languages [Second Edition]. London, Routledge: 322-337.
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Papers by Jackson Tianshin Sun
the synchronic and historical phonology of a little-known
variety of Amdo, a major Tibetic language of China.