A Brief Analysis of the Word-Formation Patterns of Naxi Four-Syllable Words
He Yao (Lijiang Teachers College, 2011) surveys the word-formation patterns of Naxi "four-syllable words" (reduplicative or fixed four-syllable expressions), a feature Naxi shares with other Tibeto-Burman Yi-branch languages such as Yi and Lahu. Building on earlier partial classifications by He Jiren/Jiang Zhuyi and He Zhiwu, and adopting Sun Yan's general definition of the Sino-Tibetan four-syllable word, the author expands the inventory from five to eight structural types by reduplication pattern (AAAA, AABB, ABAB, AABC, ABAC, ABCB, ABCC, ABCD), giving glossed western-dialect examples for each -- covering reduplicated adjectives and verbs, coordinate noun/verb-object compounds, and function-word-plus-predicate structures. The article concludes that coordinate (parallel) structure, especially subject-predicate and verb-object juxtaposition, is the dominant formation strategy across nearly all eight types, and that ABAC and ABCD types show the richest internal variety.
This page publishes the bibliographic record and the project's summary. The scanned article text belongs to its publisher and is shown to readers under a research-use policy; it is not reproduced in this record.