Cultural Perspectives on the Motivations Behind Word-Formation in the Dayan Town Dialect of Naxi
This paper, based on fieldwork in the Dayan Town (old-town Lijiang) vernacular of Western Naxi, classifies word-formation motivations into overt and covert types. Overt motivation — sound/color/form, time/space/motion, and material/function categories — covers words directly reflecting sensory features, spatial-temporal relations, and functional or occupational roles, illustrated with dozens of Naxi examples and morpheme glosses (color terms, place names, kinship-scale markers). Covert motivation covers cultural rhetoric (metaphor, personification, parody, hyperbole, metonymy), language contact (Tibetan, Dai, Bai, and historically layered Chinese loanwords tracing to Old Chinese and Sichuan/Yunnan Mandarin), custom and allusion (soul-calling rituals, sacrifices to Heaven, betrothal customs, street-washing, dog-meat taboos), and psychological naming (eclipses, rainbows, shooting stars via folk imagery). The author argues these motivations are inseparable from Naxi history, matrilineal structure, and mythology.
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