Baima nominal postpositions and their etymology
Résumé
This article focuses on nominal postpositions, used for marking the agent, the instrument, the genitive, the definite, the locative, the ablative, the dative and the comitative, in Baima, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the South-West of the People's Republic of China.
Taking previous classifications of Baima nominal postpositions (Nishida and Sun 1990; Sun 2003; Huang and Zhang 1995) as the starting point, I comment on the disputed issues in these analyses, propose a new summary of nominal postpositions in my data, argue for isomorphism of some postpositions and discuss their etymology. I demonstrate that Baima nominal postpositions are etymologically heterogeneous, some being cognate to their Classical Tibetan counterparts, some being of possibly Qiangic provenance, while others being of yet unclear origin.
The discussion is based on a corpus of Baima stories collected in 2003-2004, of which one is appended to the article.
Taking previous classifications of Baima nominal postpositions (Nishida and Sun 1990; Sun 2003; Huang and Zhang 1995) as the starting point, I comment on the disputed issues in these analyses, propose a new summary of nominal postpositions in my data, argue for isomorphism of some postpositions and discuss their etymology. I demonstrate that Baima nominal postpositions are etymologically heterogeneous, some being cognate to their Classical Tibetan counterparts, some being of possibly Qiangic provenance, while others being of yet unclear origin.
The discussion is based on a corpus of Baima stories collected in 2003-2004, of which one is appended to the article.
Domaines
Linguistique
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