A Grammar of Eastern Geshiza : A Culturally Anchored Description

Abstract

This dissertation describes Eastern Geshiza, a previously insufficiently known Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan) Horpa language spoken primarily in eastern Geshiza Valley of Danba County in the People’s Republic of China. The approximately 5000 speakers of Eastern Geshiza are categorised as ethnic Tibetans, practice agriculture, and follow the religious traditions of Bön and Tibetan Buddhism. Adopting a functional-typological framework and following an approach that emphasises linguistic ecology, the dissertation aims to anchor the grammatical description to the various contexts of the language.\n\nEastern Geshiza is currently endangered. Almost all speakers of the language are bilingual: Eastern Geshiza functions as an in-group language while Sichuanese Mandarin, also acquired since childhood, is used for external communication as a regional lingua franca. Knowledge of Tibetan lects and Written Tibetan, however, is low among the speakers. A substantial influx of new lexical loans from Chinese and a gradual language shift towards Chinese among the young constitute issues that will greatly affect both the future shape and vitality of the language.\n\nEastern Geshiza exhibits complex phonology. It possesses an extensive phoneme inventory that contains 8 fully phonemic vowels and 37 fully phonemic consonant phonemes. The language abounds in complex consonant clusters of up to three members. Eastern Geshiza is morphologically complex. The complexity is particularly prominent in verb morphology that is characterised by an argument indexation system based on accessibility hierarchy and a set of multi-functional verbal prefixes that encode orientation, aspect, and mood. Like many of the other regional languages, Eastern Geshiza is also rich in evidential categories and includes the grammatical category of engagement. Typological peculiarities of the language make it an important source of data for typological research.\n\nThe dissertation is based on first-hand field data collected on five major field trips during 2015-18 with the total duration of approximately eight months. The fieldwork was primarily carried out in Balang Village and the surrounding area, the easternmost Geshiza communities closest to Danba County Town. As its theoretical foundations, the description builds on Basic Linguistic Theory and linguistic typology. I hope that this description of the language’s most prominent features will be helpful in advancing our knowledge of Horpa studies and Trans-Himalayan linguistics together with providing new material for linguistic typology and other branches of linguistics.