This book presents a comprehensive grammatical description of Longxi Qiang, a little-studied Qiang language of Sichuan. It contains 14 chapters that covers phonology, nominal and verbal form classes, adverbs, nominal morphology, aspect, person, mood, evidentiality, epistemic modality, negation, structure of clause, clause combining and discourse features.0Longxi Qiang is a tonal, verb-final, agglutinative language. It is a head-marking and dependent-marking language. Nominal morphological processes in Longxi Qiang include compounding, derivation and inflection. Verbal morphology includes person, aspect, mood, direction, causation, evidentiality, and negation morphemes. Agentive marking in Longxi Qiang is semantically and pragmatically motivated, not syntactically motivated. Person markers reflect aspect to a great degree. Co-reference in texts can be realized by a pronoun, ellipsis, a repeated form and by lexical replacement.0The production of this book is based on the author?s PhD dissertation. One of the examiners comments that the completion of this dissertation is an important achievement, filling a lacuna in the description of endangered languages of Southern China.

This book is a full reference grammar of Qiang, one of the minority languages of southwest China, spoken by about 70,000 Qiang and Tibetan people in Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in northern Sichuan Province. It belongs to the Qiangic branch of Tibeto-Burman (one of the two major branches of Sino-Tibetan). The dialect presented in the book is the Northern Qiang variety spoken in Ronghong Village, Yadu Township, Chibusu District, Mao County. This book, the first book-length description of the Qiang language in English, is the result of many years of work on the language, and is as typologically comprehensive as possible. It includes not only the reference grammar, but also an ethnological overview, several fully analyzed texts (mostly traditional stories), and an annotated glossary. The language is verb final, agglutinative (prefixing and suffixing), and has both head-marking and dependent marking morphology. The phonology of Qiang is quite complex, with 39 consonants at seven points of articulation, plus complex consonant clusters, both in initial and final position, as well as vowel harmony, vowel length distinctions, and a set of retroflexed vowels. The grammar also is complex, with a paradigm of eight direction marking verbal prefixes, and two paradigms for person marking, one for actor, one for non-actor, and a variety of other verbal prefixes and suffixes, as well as definite and number marking on nouns. Noun phrases take classifiers and relational pospositions as well.

Taking a functional approach, this book provides a thorough overview of Morphosyntax, and sets out a framework for syntactic constructions.