| Summary: | Existential clauses in Nosu Yi frequently serve to introduce a participant into the discourse.
Syntactically, these clauses are composed of a noun phrase (the participant being introduced), a verb,
and one or more optional adverbial phrases expressing location and/or time. Thirteen different verbs
were used in existential clauses in our data. An examination of a corpus of twenty texts, both oral and
written, sheds light on the lexical semantics of each verb, many of which specify the nature of the
referent, the space in which it exists, and the posture or nature of the referent’s existence.
|
|---|