Schwa Syllables in the Pianding Dialect of Naxi
This linguistics paper offers a detailed phonological and grammatical description of the schwa syllable (a-syllable) in the Pianding dialect of Western Naxi, spoken in Dadong County, Lijiang. The authors show that the a-syllable's vowel reduces to a single phoneme /ɑ/ with two allophones, [ɑ] and [æ], whose distribution is governed chiefly by front/back and rounding harmony with the following syllable's vowel, though this harmony is being eroded by retroflexion, apical vowels, loanwords, and syllable fusion. Four tones can occur on the a-syllable, but only High, Mid, and Low level tones are basic; the mid-rising tone is derived and confined to interjections. Tone on the a-syllable is stable and carries grammatical meaning: High tone marks interrogatives, distal reference, and pet names; Mid tone marks interrogative pronouns and 'previously'; rising tone intensifies degree. The a-syllable has restricted inflectional (question-marking, intensification) and derivational (interjections, pronouns, kinship terms) functions, more limited than in related Tibeto-Burman languages.
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