The Functions of Proclitic Ab and Ghab in Hmub

Abstract

This paper aims to present a syntactic description for two cognate proclitics ab and ghab in Hmub, a Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao) language spoken in Southeast Guizhou of China. These two proclitics exhibit striking syntactic behaviors and semantic properties. Ab precedes an animate (human) nominal such as a personal name, a kinship term, an adjective or an adjective phrase, and encodes definiteness; ghab, on the other hand, exhibits a variety of functions—from spatial definiteness to relative positioning, subcategory marking to numeral partitive expression. Some host-clitic-combined groups have undergone a process of lexicalization. Hmub shows a distinction between a ghab-nominal and a common nominal. The former refers to an entity which is a part of a whole, but the latter does not. A ghab-noun is referential while a bare noun is non-referential.