The Singpho agentive - functions and meanings

• Main Author: Morey, Stephen
• Other Authors: Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2024
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities; Tibeto-Burman languages; Singpho
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/177647
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper examines the Singpho noun phrase particle i, which functions both as a marker of agentive and also as an adverbial particle, marking locationals, temporals and causals. Based on a careful examination of our text corpus, the distribution of the agentive use of this particle, which is not obligatory, is compared with that of the obligatory anti-agentive, that marks animate patients, recipients/beneficiaries and experiencers. Its use is found to only weakly correlate with either the transitivity of the verb or the definiteness of the agent referent, being slightly more likely to be employed with verbs of stronger transitivity and agents of less definiteness. It is however very frequently employed with speech act verbs.