A Study of the Hmong-Mien Languages and the Surrounding Languages in the Historical and Geographical Perspective

Research Project

Project/Area Number	13610651
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Section	一般
Research Field	言語学・音声学
Research Institution	Chiba University
Principal Investigator	TAGUCHI Yoshihisa Chiba University, Faculty of Letters, Associate Professor, 文学部, 助教授 (10291303)
Project Period (FY)	2001 – 2003
Project Status	Completed (Fiscal Year 2003)
Budget Amount *help	¥2,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,300,000) Fiscal Year 2003: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000) Fiscal Year 2002: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000) Fiscal Year 2001: ¥1,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000)
Keywords	Hmong-Mien languages / Historical linguistics / East Asian languages / 東アジア諸言語 / 苗瑶語 / 比較文法 / 名詞句の構造
Research Abstract	The report includes two papers. One of them is a comparative study of the Hmong-Mien prefixes. The other paper is a study of genetic relationship of Pana, which is a recently described Hmong-Mien language. In the first paper, the researcher pays a special attention to the prefixes of the Hmong-Mien languages. This is because prefixiation is one of a few grammatical processes that the Hmong-Mien languages have, and it provides a clue to reconstructing the syllable structure of Proto-Hmong-Mien. Based on the database of the Hmong-Mien prefixes, the researcher investigates the following three points : (1) How the prefixes are distributed ; (2) if the prefixes in the dialects correspond to one another; (3) if some common functions are found. The results are (1) the distribution is dense in the northwest, but sparse in the southeast ; (2) one prefix *q[a]-is seen in most dialects, and is to be reconstructed in Proto-Hmong-Mien ; (3) thee prefixes of the Hmong-Mien languages have the function of noun classification, but this is different in nature from that of classifiers. Some grammatical forms other than classifiers must have provided a way to classify nouns in the proto-language. The prefixes are considered to be relics of these forms.