Prosodic Morphology of Verb and Adjective Syllables in Yi

Abstract

Prosodic morphology is an important research object of prosodic typology, and also one of the important elements of prosody and morphology. This paper briefly discusses the prosodic form of the Yi language in terms of the number of syllables in verbs and adjectives. Pure verbs in Yi language usually appear in the form of single syllables. When restricted in grammatical activities, they are always flexibly used by adding the number of syllables, the most obvious one being nominalization. There are two types of adjectives in the Yi language, namely property adjective and state adjective. They can be mainly differentiated in terms of the syllable numbers of a word: the property adjectives are often monosyllabic, while the state adjectives are polysyllabic. The category of level is also expressed by adjusting the number of syllables. The more syllables, the greater the category of level change.