Abstract:

In this paper,the lexical and phonological forms of the demonstratives system and its syntactic functions of Naxi are depicted.It is found that the system conforms to the hierarchical sequence of distance cuts of the demonstrative and shows a high degree of flexibility at the syntactic level.Meanwhile,the phenomenon of “this” being virtualized as a topic marker in specific contexts is considered to be a proof of the common features of the topic structure of the Tibetan-Burman language group.

Key words: Naxi, demonstrative, Tibetan-Burman language