Pragmatic Strategies in Prinmi

Abstract

Prinmi is a Tibeto-Burman language, spoken by the Pǔmǐ (普米) nationality in Yunnan and the Tibetan nationality in Mùlǐ (木里), Sichuan in southwestern China. Like most TibetoBurman languages in the Sino-sphere, Prinmi is a topic prominence language. It has two topic markers: one for marking aboutness topic, shown in (1), and the other for marking frame-setting topic, as in (2). (1) Diebbonf ggi dev peatefmi ggon kea=rio. flag Top this young.man Spc.Ag push=Impf ‘The flag, this young man is pushing (it).’ [Elicited from the second one of two pictures after showing a flag in the first one.] (2) Refquee bbo mif di nea-chiif=si, ... frontside Frs person one down-stand=Prf ‘In the front stood a person; ...’ There are several kinds of topic-comment constructions, often with a rather complicated structure. Furthermore, Prinmi develops a number of less-discussed pragmatic strategies which involve a quotative marker and a nominal clause construction. This paper will survey pragmatic strategies employed in the grammar of Prinmi, aimed at presenting a general inventory of these strategies without going into great details. The major bodies of the paper will first address morphosyntactic marking, including the two sentence-initial topic markers, a focus marker, and various utterance-final discourse particles. Next, I will deal with pragmatic strategies at the clause level: (a) the use of quotative to express the speaker’s intention of distancing himself from the propositional meaning, and (b) the availability of a nominal clause construction to signal subjective implication. Finally, I will demonstrate how Prinmi builds up complex sentences through the topic-comment construction. These strategies are considered to be motivated pragmatically rather than morphosyntactically, as their application is not compulsory in Prinmi. If they are not employed, information will simply be packaged in a different manner without affecting grammaticality of the sentence. Prinmi data used in this paper were collected on two field trips to a Prinmi-speaking community in Yunnan. The first set of collection consists of folklure and spontaneous short texts. The second set is for contributing to a typological project and it is largely experimentbased: utterances are elicited through graphic stimulation. Abbreviations Ag Agentive Prf Perfective Frs Frame-setting Spc Specific Impf Imperfective Top Topic