Agentive marking in Yongning Na (Mosuo)

• المؤلف الرئيسي: Lidz, Liberty A.
• مؤلفون آخرون: STEDT / University of California, Berkeley
• التنسيق: مقال
• اللغة: English
• منشور في: 2024
• الموضوعات: Arts and Humanities; Agentive marking; Optional case marking
• الوصول للمادة أونلاين: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/177660
• المؤسسة: Nanyang Technological University

Agentive marking in Yongning Na (Mosuo) appears with non-canonical constituent orders; with ellipsed patients; to indicate volitionality and agency; to mark contrastive focus/switch in actor; and acts as an utterance predicate with direct speech complements. Semantic extension has occurred from the contrastive focus usage of the agentive, which marks a constituent as salient, to an emphatic marker, which marks saliency on non-nominals. Although agentive marking often occurs in clauses with structural ambiguity, it often does not resolve this structural ambiguity. Structural ambiguity, however, rarely results in true ambiguity.