Tangut and Horpa languages

Abstract

Fieldwork from the past decade has yielded new data from a cluster of languages in Western Sichuan (China), resulting in new observations relevant for the understanding of Tangut grammar. In this paper, I intend to present morphosyntactic evidence pointing to the Tangut language’s membership within the Horpa taxon, located within the larger Gyalrongic group of the Qiangic branch of Sino-Tibetan. Tangut exclusively shares with Horpa languages cognates that are far too peculiar to be the result of mere chance. By successively considering the verbal, nominal, and postpositional domains, the present paper highlights evidence that links Tangut to Horpa, while proposing new paths to the understanding of grammatical categories of Tangut proper, such as orientational/aspectual preverbs.1