Emphatic Agent-Focus Constructions in Naxi
Wang Song and Yang Shunfang describe Naxi's 'emphatic agent-focus construction,' which substitutes for the passive voice that Naxi otherwise lacks. The construction is marked by the particle nɯ33 following the agent noun, and can appear in agent-emphasizing form ('agent + patient + predicate') or patient-emphasizing form ('patient + patientive particle + agent + predicate'), with either the agent or patient omittable when recoverable from context. The authors show nɯ33 is highly polyfunctional, also marking location, time, source, and instrument in non-agentive sentences, and that its presence or absence does not change the core agent-patient relationship of a sentence, distinguishing it from a true passive marker. They note, however, that when Naxi speakers translate Chinese passive sentences (marked with bèi), nɯ33 is regularly used to render 'bèi,' and argue that growing Naxi-Chinese bilingualism risks reanalyzing this originally non-passive construction as a genuine passive, paralleling a similar development already documented in Hani.
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