Doctoral dissertation research: Research on Xong (ISO 639-3 code mmr), a Miao-Yao Language of Hunan Province, China

本论文的研究目标是双重的。首先，它将为中国所在的湖南和贵州两省的近100万人提供Xong语言的描述性语法--也就是一本书那么长的语音和语法描述。其次，它将允许收集数百个小时的Xong句子、民间故事、对话和其他文本的录音。所有必要的数据将在湘西的Xong语村庄收集，项目完成后，语法和录音都将免费向公众开放。尽管Xong在过去的几个世纪里受到了普通话和其他汉语的一些语言影响，但它与它们完全无关。相反，它属于苗瑶家族，这意味着它实际上与东南亚许多地区和美国使用的苗语有很远的亲缘关系。据估计，苗瑶语系包含一百多种相互难以理解的语言，但它仍然是世界上描述最少的语系之一。Xong本身就是一个很好的例子，因为这种语言在英语语言文献中几乎被完全忽视了。这种缺乏研究对任何苗瑶语言来说都是不幸的，特别是Xong。这种语言有许多不同寻常的特点，包括近70个不同的辅音(相比之下，英语和普通话各有24个左右)和8个不同的声调(普通话只有4个，广东话和越南语各只有6个)。Xong还展示了几个有趣的语法特征，包括异常丰富的名词性前缀、关系从句和表意音系统。这个项目不仅将产生迄今为止最全面的Xong语言描述，而且确实是对苗瑶语言最全面的描述。此外，它还将能够为今后类似描述中国的其他未被研究的语言提供范本。该奖项还将加强对研究生的培训。

The goals of this dissertation project are twofold. First, it will produce a descriptive grammar -- that is, a comprehensive, book-length phonological and grammatical description -- of the Xong language, spoken by nearly a million people in China's Hunan and Guizhou Provinces. Second, it will allow the collection of several hundred hours' worth of recorded Xong sentences, folktales, conversations, and other texts. All necessary data will be collected in Xong-speaking villages in western Hunan, and both grammar and recordings will be made freely available to the public upon the project's completion.Although Xong has received some linguistic influence from Mandarin and other Chinese languages over the past several centuries, it is completely unrelated to them. Instead, it belongs to the Miao-Yao family, meaning that it is in fact distantly related to the Hmong language spoken in many parts of Southeast Asia and the US. The Miao-Yao family has been estimated to contain over a hundred mutually unintelligible languages, but it remains one of the least described language families in the world. Xong itself is a perfect example, as the language has been almost completely ignored in the English linguistic literature.This lack of research would be unfortunate for any Miao-Yao language, but it is particularly so in the case of Xong. The language has a number of unusual features, including nearly seventy distinct consonants (in contrast, English and Mandarin each have around two dozen) and eight distinct tones (Mandarin has only four, and Cantonese and Vietnamese each have only six). Xong displays several interesting grammatical features as well, including unusually rich systems of nominal prefixes, relative clauses, and ideophones.This project will not only produce the most comprehensive linguistic description of Xong to date, but indeed the most comprehensive description of any Miao-Yao language. Furthermore, it will be able to serve as a model for similar descriptions of China's other understudied languages in the future. This award will also enhance the training of a graduate student.