Nominalization in Nuosu Yi

Nuosu Yi (a Tibeto-Burman language spoken mainly in the southwestern provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou in China) has two sentential nominalizers. One is the morpheme ko³³ (a third person singular pronoun in origin), which is used to mark verb complement clauses, topic clauses, temporal adverbial clauses, and conditional clauses. The other is the morpheme su³³, which is found in gerundives, relative clauses, and sentential focus clauses. In this paper, we start with a descriptive distinction between derivational nominalization and syntactic nominalization in Nuosu Yi, and then move on to an examination of the nominalization strategies involved in the use of su³³, whose grammatical functions range over marking definiteness, relativization, and focus complementation. We explore the mechanisms giving rise to structural reanalysis that has taken place in su³³ nominalization. We also extend our analysis to the morpheme ko33 and discuss its similarities with and differences from su³³ and how it develops from a pronoun to a sentential nominalizer.

• Affiliations: 1: South China Normal University; 2: Chinese University of Hong Kong