The zoom-on-possessee construction in Kam (Dong): the anatomy of a new construction type
Kam, a Kadai language spoken in Guizhou province (People's Republic of China), has a family of intransitive possessive constructions with the word order ‘Possessor–Verb–Possessee’. (The basic word order in Kam is SV and AVO.) While two recent papers have featured this unique construction type for an array of other Southeast Asian languages, they fail to acknowledge its distinct semantic value in contrast to the related construction type ‘Possessee–Possessor–Verb’. The former construction type displays a so-called ‘zoom-effect’: the possessor is predicated IN, AT or THROUGH his/her/its possessee; the predication zooms from the possessor on his/her/its possessee. The latter construction, in c…
Inflectional speaker-role classifiers in Weining Ahmao
Abstract This paper is the first of two (see references) aiming to bring to the attention of pragmaticians an idiosyncratic classifier system that encodes speaker-roles along the lines of gender and age. Isolating (analytic) languages are known for their scarcity of word forms and for their under-specification of grammatical categories. Analytic languages in East and Southeast Asian involve classifiers – a word category without counterpart in most languages of the inflectional type – to attenuate some of the vagueness in the nominal realm. Similar to other parts of speech, the classifier generally constitutes a one-form word category with occasional sandhi-derivations. Weining Ahmao, a Miao…