| This dissertation is a grammatical and historical account of the Minhe Mangghuer language. Mangghuer, spoken in China's Qinghai Province, has previously been considered to be a dialect of the Monguor or Tu language, of the Mongolic language family. This research suggests that Mangghuer ought to be considered a separate language.;The dissertation is organized around a systematic synchronic description of Mangghuer phonological, morphological and syntactic structures. These structures are considered from the perspective of a historical, typological, and functional approach to their development and use. Most of the data is drawn from natural discourse, relying primarily on a corpus of folktale narratives.;Wherever possible, the Mangghuer system is compared to those of other Mongolic languages. Mangghuer retains many typological features from its Mongolic roots, including SOV basic word order, clause-chaining syntax, and exclusively suffixing, agglutinative morphology, as well as Mongolic core vocabulary.;However, Mangghuer has also undergone massive influences from other languages, and the Qinghai-Gansu region, in which it is spoken, is shown to exhibit many characteristics of a linguistic area. The historical discussion highlights some specific results of language contact on Mangghuer, including massive lexical borrowing from Chinese, as well as the primarily Sinitic phonological system and the Bodic evidential system which Mangghuer has acquired. Mangghuer cannot be considered simply a Mongolic language, in the normal genetic sense. It has features of both a Mongolic language and a mixed language.;A grammaticalization perspective yields enlightening accounts of some Mangghuer morphosyntactic developments; it is also suggested that some Mangghuer grammaticalization processes may have been motivated by contact with other languages.;The syntactic behavior of Mangghuer nonfinite clauses is shown to challenge some standard analytical terms in the typology of clause-combining syntax. The distinctions of subordination vs. cosubordination, and adverbial clauses vs. clause chaining, are found to be difficult to apply to Mangghuer constructions. The Mangghuer evidence suggests that these categories cannot be held to be rigidly distinct. |
