The kə⁵⁵ Comparative of Superiority in Old Town Naxi
Based on fieldwork with two speakers of the Old Town (Gucheng) district dialect of Lijiang Naxi, this paper reports a previously undocumented comparative-of-superiority construction marked by the postposition kə⁵⁵, alongside the well-known and dominant cio²¹-marked comparative. Using the typological frameworks of Stassen and Heine, the authors show that kə⁵⁵ carries both an allative function and a (more basic) static locative function, evidenced by contexts where kə⁵⁵-phrases still take further case marking, indicating incomplete grammaticalization. Certain parameter types — emotional predicates, verb-complement constructions, and modal-morpheme expressions — resist kə⁵⁵ and require cio²¹ instead. The authors classify the kə⁵⁵ comparative as a locative-type / location-schema comparative, consistent with Naxi's SOV, postpositional word order and with established word-order universals, and suggest spatial locative marking as a recurrent historical source of Naxi standard markers generally.
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