Some Speculations on the Noun Phrase Structure of Jingpo

Description

University of Southern California, 2015. - 14 p.This paper focuses on a far less-studied language, Jingpo – a Tibeto-Burman language that allows the demonstrative to appear either prenominally or postnominally. One of the major goals of this paper is to accommodate the different distribution of the demonstrative in the language. Another goal of this paper is to provide an adequate account for adjectives, since it has been noted in the literature (Gu & Dai 2003) that they can appear in either prenominal or postnominal position (though with slightly different forms). This paper is organized as follows: in the following section, some background information about Jingpo will be provided. In section 3, I will illustrate the different properties of prenominal and postnominal adjectives, and I will argue that prenominal and postnominal adjectives have different statuses. The properties of the demonstratives in Jingpo as well as its distributional patterns will be examined in section 4. In section 5, I will provide a principled account for the different placements of the demonstrative. Some concluding remarks will be given in section 6.