Transitivity, Focus, Case and the Auxiliary Verb Systems in Yami

This work attempts to present important and original observations and generalizations of some syntactic aspects of the Yami language, First of all, the author starts examining the intransitive and transitive constructions, and the ergativity of the Yaim language has been established. Then, the focus constructions are studied in detail, and each focusing affix with which the verb is inflected in each focus construction has been identified. A list of case markers and a list of various pronominal forms are also given in this article. The author not only defines the case form each case marker indicates or each pronominal form displays, but also provides detailed evidence and arguments to show the characteristics of the case markers and the pronominal system. In Yami, both verbs and time adverbials bear tense features. Yami verbs can be 'present' tense or 'non-present' tense while time adverbials may bear the features of 'past' tense or those of 'non-past' tense. And like many Formsan langauges, the Yami tense marker in a clause is an auxiliary verb that functions as the syntactic head of a clause. The different functions of the various negators and the imperative sentences have also been studied. There are five negators in Yami. Imperative sentences in Yami have been found to bear some universal features. For instance, imperative implies the second person, and imperative verb forms are verb stems, without any indication of tesnse. The distinctive characteristic of Yami imperatives is that only positive imperative verbs are suffixed by the imperative morpheme. This is only a beginning study of the Yami language. More data should be collected and many structures need to be further examined and analyzed.