REFINING THE TYPOLOGICAL PROFILE OF SINITIC Hilary Chappell Linguistics and Modern Languages Department, CUHK & EHESS-CRLAO, Paris Sinitic languages comprize ten main branches for which there is little intercomprehensibility. If it were possible to calculate the number of distinct dialects in China, Sinitic would undoubtedly prove to be more diverse than its sister group, Tibeto-Burman, claimed to have 260-300 different languages. The typological profile of Sinitic is generally described in terms of features such as lexical tone, simple syllabic structure, and a basic SVO word order that has topic-comment variants. Above all, the current consensus regarding its classification as an isolating or analytic type of language with impoverished morphology overlooks the astonishing diversity of morphological features that can be identified across the hundreds of dialects and varieties. As a whole, these features are relatively little explored from a pan-Sinitic angle, and are certainly less well-known outside of the Chinese linguistics domain. For its objective, this paper proposes a refinement of the typological profile of Sinitic languages by considering three main types of morphological features : agglutinative, fusional and non-linear, the latter including tone morphemes and tone patterns. An initial example of an entirely common agglutinative-fusional pattern is verb reduplication in the Jin languages for expressing the delimitative aspect : In the Jiexiu dialect of this Sinitic branch, the process combines prefixation by kʌʔ53 on both verb forms with diminutive suffixation on the reduplicant, thereby creating a new fused syllable rhyme. Jiexiu dialect 介休方言 (Jin, Sinitic) 圪看圪看儿 kʌʔ53-khæ̃35 kʌʔ53-khar35 PREF-look PREF-look.DIM ‘Take a little look.’ (Zhang Yimei, 1991: 53) REFERENCE: Zhang, Yimei. 1991. Jiexiu Fangyanzhi 介休方言志 [The Jiexiu gazetteer]. Taiyuan: Shanxi Gaoxiao Lianhe Publishers.