Agentive marking in Yongning Na (Mosuo)

• Main Author: Lidz, Liberty A.
• Other Authors: STEDT / University of California, Berkeley
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2024
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities; Agentive marking; Optional case marking
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/177660
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Agentive marking in Yongning Na (Mosuo) appears with non-canonical constituent orders; with ellipsed patients; to indicate volitionality and agency; to mark contrastive focus/switch in actor; and acts as an utterance predicate with direct speech complements. Semantic extension has occurred from the contrastive focus usage of the agentive, which marks a constituent as salient, to an emphatic marker, which marks saliency on non-nominals. Although agentive marking often occurs in clauses with structural ambiguity, it often does not resolve this structural ambiguity. Structural ambiguity, however, rarely results in true ambiguity.