Notes to Ding

1. I am grateful to all my Prinmi friends and acquaintances who have helped me in one way or another on my field trips in northwestern Yunnan for this study. I have benefited enormously from comments and critiques from Alexis Michaud, Katia Chirkova, and two reviewers. Thanks also go to Angela Cheater for proofreading the manuscript. Of course, I take sole responsibility for any residual errors and problems in the paper. Finally, I acknowledge the support of research funding from Macao Polytechnic Institute (PR/ESLT-3/2003) for the study’s fieldwork expenses.
Nonstandard abbreviations in glosses include: CLT=clitic and to.SPK=(of directional prefix) towards the speaker.

2. According to their oral tradition, the ancestors of the Prinmi people led a nomadic life in the northwestern part of present-day China.

3. Lu (2001:607) provides details of field research as follows: Lu Shaozun and Luo Bingfen undertook field trips to a number of villages in Sichuan and Yunnan (excluding Lanping) between 1956 and 1957. Lu Shaozun and Sun Hongkai conducted subsequent fieldwork in Lanping (Yunnan) in 1964 and in Muli (Sichuan) in 1980.

4. The quasi-falling, high, and rising tones correspond to tones I, II, and III in table 1, respectively.

5. Indeed, if prenuclear rhoticity were regarded as a secondary articulation of plosives, ‘star’ in Xinyingpan, given in (4c), would not involve a consonant cluster, and Xinyingpan Prinmi could be described as having no consonant clusters (treating the affricate also as a single unit).

6. Zee (2003:131) points out that words with voiced initial obstruents in Shanghai carry a low tone, whereas words with voiceless counterparts bear a non-low tone.

7. One may question whether the couple are good consultants for providing Prinmi data, given their partial confusion of tones I and II. As far as I can tell, the female speaker, even though no longer an active speaker, has maintained much of her competence in Prinmi. She has also worked with renowned linguists and provided enormous amounts of Prinmi data.

8. While there is much literature about contact-induced changes on minority languages, e.g. Evans 2001, Thurgood and Li 2003, Noonan 2003, Matisoff 2001, etc., there has been as yet little discussion on the impact of one tone language on another tone language.