Phonological Forms and Syntactic Functions of Naxi Demonstratives
He Jin (Heilongjiang University) describes the phonological forms and syntactic functions of demonstratives in the Lijiang-basin variety of western Naxi. The system is built on two core morphemes, "this-1" and "that-1," which combine with morphemes for individual entities, location, time, quality/manner, and degree to form the full demonstrative inventory (tabulated with IPA forms). Distance marking follows a hierarchical sequence -- location shows a three-way proximal/distal/extra-distal split, people/things and time show only a two-way split, and quality/manner and degree show no distance distinction at all. Syntactically, demonstratives can serve as subject, object, attributive, adverbial, or complement, illustrated with eighteen glossed example sentences. The article's central claim is that "this-1" has grammaticalized into a topic marker in certain contexts, anchoring new information as a known topic, which the author argues corroborates a broader Tibeto-Burman pattern of demonstratives evolving into topic markers via a noun-plus-demonstrative word order.
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.