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.