A Grammar of Guiqiong: A Language of Sichuan

In A Grammar of Guiqiong, Jiang Li describes the grammar of Guiqiong, a hitherto undocumented language spoken by alpine people in Kangding county, China. Guiqiong has a lot to offer in its phonology, verbal and nominal morphology, syntax and glossary, distinguishing itself from the neighbouring Tibetan, Chinese, Qiangic and Loloish languages. The newly discovered features of Guiqiong include breathy vs. modal voice, indefinite number, ablative, ergative, instrumental, dative and genitive case markers, topic and emphatic markers, the diminutive suffixes, the pronominal and deictic systems, demonstratives and numerals, a rich store of differentiated copular verbs expressing equationality, inchoative, animacy vs. inanimacy, dependent existence and negation, verbal affixes indicating directions, present tense of experienced perceptions, gnomic tense, perfective vs. imperfective aspect, modality and evidentiality.