The Speaker as Point of Reference in Naxi

This paper provides detailed descriptions of the morphosyntactic and semantic properties of aspectual, directional and evidential expressions in Naxi, a minority language spoken in Yunnan, China. Although all these expressions develop from verbs, they retain the property of having the speaker as point of reference of the original verbs. The fact that this property is retained regardless of their aspectual or non-aspectual use shows that the speaker as point of reference is an essential part of language.