This paper outlines Tibetan morphosyntactic features transferred into two genetically unrelated and typologically distinct languages, Salar (Turkic) and Wutun (Sinitic), both spoken in the same linguistic area, the Amdo Sprachbund located in the Upper Yellow River basin in Western China.Part of the research cited in this paper was carried out under the research project “Interactional, Cross-Linguistic, Theoretical and Areal Perspectives on Evidentiality and Egophoricity” funded by the Academy of Finland. Examples not otherwise cited are from the two authors’ fieldwork. We wish to thank all our Salar, Wutun and Amdo Tibetan friends for their patience and helpfulness in helping us to understand their languages. We are also grateful to the organizers and fellow participants of the International Workshop on Linguistic Microareas of South Asia held in Uppsala on May 5–6, 2014, to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and to Christopher Culver for improving the English language of our paper.Due to long-term linguistic contact with Amdo Tibetan, the culturally dominant language in the region, Salar and Wutun have undergone many parallel convergence processes, and they have developed shared grammatical features not found in their genetic relatives spoken elsewhere. By comparing the grammatical structures transferred from Tibetan into both Salar and Wutun, we aim to identify the most prominent Tibetan grammatical features that tend to be copied into neighboring languages despite their different genetic affiliations and typological profiles. Our study highlights the role of Tibetan as the dominant language of the Sprachbund, serving as a model for linguistic convergence for its neighboring languages.

This paper discusses the category of egophoricity in Wutun. Drawing from first-hand field material, I show how markers of egophoricity in Wutun interact with person. In the introductory section, I provide basic information on the Wutun language and on its areal context, typological profile and verb structure. I then introduce Wutun basic egophoric morphology and discuss manipulations of the basic system. It will be shown that pragmatic factors like volitionality, mirativity, the speaker’s degree of certainty concerning the truth value of the statement, and the speaker’s expectations of access to information by the addressee play significant roles in the interaction between egophoricity and person in Wutun. Finally, I discuss egophoricity in Wutun as an areal feature and suggest some possible diachronic sources for egophoricity markers.

In this chapter, different types of data used in evidentiality studies are discussed. We first discuss reference grammars, which are necessary for any cross-linguistic study of evidentials. This is followed by a discussion of (different types of) usage-based data, as well as natural language data and stimulus-based data collection used in linguistic fieldwork. We end our discussion by examining data collected by means of questionnaires and acceptability judgments. It is shown that all the types of data discussed are relevant for a full understanding of evidentiality, but they differ in their contribution and complement each other. For example, usage-based data is necessary for studying frequencies in languages, while reference grammars reveal what is common across languages.

The present study discusses typology and variation of word order patterns in nominal and verb structures across 20 Chinese languages and compares them with another 43 languages from the Sino-Tibetan family. The methods employed are internal and external historical reconstruction and correlation studies from linguistic typology and sociolinguistics. The results show that the head-final tendency is a baseline across the family, but individual languages differ by the degree of head-initial structures allowed in a language, leading to a hybrid word order profile. On the one hand, Chinese languages consistently manifest the head-final noun phrase structures, whereas head-initial deviants can be explained either internally through reanalysis or externally through contact. On the other hand, Chinese verb phrases have varied toward head-initial structures due to contact with verb-medial languages of Mainland Southeast Asia, before reinstalling the head-final structures as a consequence of contact with verb-final languages in North Asia. When extralinguistic factors are considered, the typological north-south divide of Chinese appears to be geographically consistent and gradable by the latitude of individual Chinese language communities, confirming the validity of a broader typological cline from north to south in Eastern Eurasia.

This paper discusses the various functions of the multifunctional case marker - ha in Wutun, a mixed Sinitic language with Northwest Mandarin lexicon and Amdo Tibetan syntax spoken in Tongren County, eastern part of Qinghai Province, Amdo Sprachbund. I will show that the use of - ha is connected to Differential Argument Marking and it is motivated partly by semantic factors and partly by information structure. The case marker - ha often occurs on the Recipient, Patient or Causee argument in clauses with two animate arguments and it can therefore be used to disambiguate arguments. Its use is also connected to affectedness, which can be operationalized in terms of definiteness and saliency. Patient arguments are more likely to be marked with - ha if they are totally affected (e.g. The dog ate the dumplings ) than only partially affected (e.g. The dog ate some dumplings ). However, the use of - ha cannot be explained solely on the basis of semantic factors and it is often connected to information structure, such as expressing contrastiveness, activating previously mentioned topic or differentiating between topical and focal parts of the sentence. In summary, -ha is used with highly affected non-Agent arguments that often play a special role in information structure.