A Descriptive Grammar of Yongning Na (Mosuo)

Description

This dissertation is a descriptive grammar of Yongning Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in southwestern China. The theoretical approaches taken are functional syntax and the discourse-based approach to language description anddocumentation. The aim of this dissertation is to describe the ways that the language’sfeatures and subsystems intersect to make Na a unique entity: analycity; zero anaphora;OV word order; topic/comment information structure; a five-part evidential system; aconjunct/disjunct-like system that intersects with evidentiality and verbal semantics;prolific grammaticalization; overlap between nominalization and relativization andassociated structures; representation of time through aspect, Aktionsart, adverbials, andcontext; and the Daba shamanic register.Topics covered in the grammar include a description of the sociolinguisticenvironment; the phonemic inventory; phonological processes; compounding; wordclasses; the structure of noun phrases; the classifier system; types of possession; methodsfor quantification; grammatical relations and non-systemic ‘ergative’ and ‘anti-ergative’marking; the structure of verb phrases; the multiple existential verbs; the aspectualsystem; evidentiality; grammaticalization; clause-combining; narrative texts; and lexicon.