A Descriptive Grammar of Yongning Na (Mosuo) now available on line!!

[Randy LaPolla]

Good news for the TB community! Liberty Lidz’ dissertation is now available on line. You can download it from <https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/ETD-UT-2010-12-2643/LIDZ-DISSERTATION.pdf> or go to
http://tibeto-burman.net/recent_pubs.html and click on the link.

Lidz, Liberty A. 2010. A Descriptive Grammar of Yongning Na (Mosuo). PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. This dissertation is a descriptive grammar of Yongning Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto- Burman language spoken in southwestern China. The theoretical approaches taken are functional syntax and the discourse-based approach to language description and documentation. The aim of this dissertation is to describe the ways that the language’s features and subsystems intersect to make Na a unique entity: analycity; zero anaphora; OV word order; topic/comment information structure; a five-part evidential system; a conjunct/disjunct-like system that intersects with evidentiality and verbal semantics; prolific grammaticalization; overlap between nominalization and relativization and associated structures; representation of time through aspect, Aktionsart, adverbials, and context; and the Daba shamanic register. Topics covered in the grammar include a description of the sociolinguistic environment; the phonemic inventory; phonological processes; compounding; word classes; the structure of noun phrases; the classifier system; types of possession; methods for quantification; grammatical relations and non-systemic ‘ergative’ and ‘anti-ergative’ marking; the structure of verb phrases; the multiple existential verbs; the aspectual system; evidentiality; grammaticalization; clause-combining; narrative texts; and lexicon.
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