Argument Markers and Their Alignments in Naxi: A Case of Cyclic Evolution
Liu Jun surveys agentive and object (patient/recipient) marking across 32 Naxi varieties to trace how these markers and their alignment patterns evolve. The agentive marker (nɯ33 and cognates) is shown, via discourse statistics from Lijiang-basin texts, to be pragmatics-driven and optional — correlating with definiteness and emphasis rather than disambiguation or topic status — and to derive historically from an ablative/source marker via the path source > agentive marker, with a further drift toward an emphasis marker. Object marking is animacy-sensitive and derives mainly from four classes of locational morpheme meaning "above," "head," "inside," and "surface/side," which differ in layering across varieties (six attested marking types). The paper models this as a spiral/cyclic evolution from a no-object-marker stage through a primary-object stage, driven by part-to-whole metaphor and functional competition among morphemes of different historical layers.
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