Features and Origin of the Agent and Patient Markers in the Naxi Language of Dayan Town
This article, based on the Dayan Town vernacular of the western Naxi dialect, describes and analyzes the Naxi agent marker ɳø33 and patient markers kja31/kœ55. It shows that marker use depends on animacy differences between agent and patient, word order (Naxi is SOV, with both subject and object preceding the verb), pragmatic emphasis and contrastive focus, and obligatory contexts such as ditransitive, causative, speech-act, and relative-clause constructions. Both markers are polysemous: the agent marker also functions as a locative, instrumental, and source (ablative) marker, while the patient marker also functions as a dative and comparative marker. Invoking grammaticalization theory and cognitive-linguistic accounts of spatial-to-abstract semantic extension, the author argues the patient marker derives historically from the locative noun "shang" (上, "on"). She finds a parallel polysemy pattern in the local Lijiang Chinese dialect's own "shang" marker, attributing this convergence to Naxi's substrate influence on local Chinese.
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