In this recent reference grammar of Achang, Shi Jian investigates the phonology, word classes, morphosyntax, and discourse structure of the Husa dialect of Achang spoken in Longchuan county, Yunnan province, China. The book is divided into five parts: an introduction, followed by the phonology, word formation, syntax, and an appendix.
A Sketch of Achang 阿昌语简志 (Dai Qingxia, Beijing: Publishing House of Minority Nationalities, 1985) was the first grammatical sketch of the Achang language. Compared to Dai, Shi's work offers a significant improvement. It is worth mentioning that both focus on the Husa dialect, but present phonological differences of diachronic interest. In Dai's analysis, /l/ and /x/ are presented as different phonemes, while they have merged into /x/ in Shi's system. These two systems, separated by almost four decades, demonstrate phonological merging over time. Shi makes a contrast between /ɯ/ and /ə/, but Dai's system only has /ə/, possibly because Dai did not notice this contrast. Additionally, Shi's classification of words, phrases, and sentences is more specific with more detailed analyses, as well as more natural data.
The first chapter introduces the background to the research, including an overview of the Achang ethnic group and a literature review. The author mentions that Achang belongs to the Burmish sub-branch of the Tibeto-Burman branch, closely related to Burmese and Bola, which is in line with recent phylogenetic analyses by Sagart et al. (“Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116/21, 2019, 10317–10322). However, it would be more convincing to show substantial evidence to support the affiliation of Achang, such as shared phonological and morphological innovations. Similarly, the author mentions three dialects in Achang – Lianghe, Luxi, and Longchuan – without giving supporting evidence.
The second chapter is about the phonology of Achang. The author summarizes 36 consonants, nine vowels, and four tones in Achang. Additionally, the author describes six types of phonological process in Achang: Sandhi, epenthesis, lenition, assimilation, fusion, and deletion. The description of the phonological processes in Achang is particularly remarkable, as it provides a diachronic perspective for the understanding of the linguistic processes that have shaped a language over time.
In the third chapter, the author analyses the word formation of Achang, and presents various affixes in Achang with explanations of their usage and origins. Furthermore, the author presents Burmese, Mandarin, and Dai loanwords in Achang, which is significant for tracing language contact.
Chapter 4, which covers the grammatical system of Achang, is the most extensive part of the book, including word classes, phrases, and sentences, showcasing grammatical features with natural data collected from fieldwork. Compared to the most conservative languages in the Burmo-Qiangic branch, Achang does not have much inflectional morphology. Instead, it usually employs sentence-final particles to indicate tense, aspect, and modality. However, Achang has preserved traces of derivational morphology for the causative voice. The author presents four strategies to derive causative forms in Achang: 1) derivation from unaspirated to aspirated initials; 2) from “non-devoiced” to devoiced initials; 3) from voiced fricative initials to voiceless fricative initials; 4) from zero-initial to voiceless fricative-initial. There are several issues in this classification. First, Strategy 2 and Strategy 3 can be merged as voicing alternation. Second, Strategy 4 can be summarized as prefixation. Third, the given example for Strategy 3 ʐo “be scared” > x-ʐo “scare” should be an example for prefixation instead of voicing. Fourth, the author sees x- and ɕ- as two distinct prefixes, but they can be further analysed as two varieties of a single type. The process of e > ɕ-e comes from e > *x-e, as e is a high vowel that triggers the palatalization from *x-e to ɕ-e. Therefore, the four strategies could be further synthesized into three: aspiration alternation, voicing alternation, and prefixation. While language-internal description is generally sufficient for a reference grammar, it would still be desirable for the author to look into similar phenomena in related languages. According to Yanson (“Aspiration in the Burmese phonological system: a diachronic account”, Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages IV, Leiden: Brill, 2012, 17–21), Burmese has a phonological system with a two-way contrast of aspiration: pre-aspiration and post-aspiration, to differentiate causative and non-causative verbs, which is very similar to Achang. For example, in Achang and Lashi Burmese researched by Hill (The Historical Phonology of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), the derivational processes from “be scared” to “scare” are both achieved by adding a pre-initial, Achang: ʐo “be scared” > x-ʐo “scare”, Lashi: kjuːk3¹ “be scared” > ˀkjuːk⁵⁵ “scare”. The author could have compared them to explore the origin of aspiration alternation in Achang to see if pre-aspiration and post-aspiration proposed by Yanson are indeed separate processes that occurred at different times, or whether they are just the same process with different conditioned realizations.
In addition to word formation, chapter 4 describes an analysis of the formation of phrases and sentences. The author begins by classifying Achang phrases into nine types based on the internal structure. Concerning sentential constructions, the author proposes two independent ways to classify sentences according to their moods and structures.
The final part of the book contains an appendix that includes three original texts and a rich word list of over 4,000 words. These natural data based on the field research provide readers with a reliable resource for further research on Achang.
In conclusion, Shi here offers a clear analysis of the grammar of Achang. It not only highlights typological features exhibited in Achang with fresh and original data, but also serves as a valuable reference for the study of related languages or other Tibeto-Burman languages.
