Old Tibetan verb morphology and semantics

An attempt at a reconstruction

Bibliographic Data

ID8092689
AuthorsJoanna Bialek (0000-0001-8542-4272, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume19
Issue1
Publication date2020-08-19
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHimalayan Linguistics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1544-7502 • E-ISSN: 1544-7502
PublisherCalifornia Digital Library (CDL) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.5070/h919145017
OpenAlexW3080929889
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited5

The paper presents the first complete reconstruction of the Old Tibetan (OT) verb morphology and semantics. Old Tibetan had a productive verb inflection with meaningful inflectional affixes b-, g-, ɣ-, d-, -d, and -s. The distribution of the prefixes was asymmetric and closely related to transitivity of a verb. Verbs of highest transitivity formed four distinct stems, whereas intransitive verbs inflected for one or two stems only. Grammatical voice is the only category that can explain the disproportion in the markings of transitive and intransitive verbs. Because the basic opposition was that between active and passive voice, intransitive verbs could only form active forms, whereas both active and passive forms were available for the majority of transitive verbs. In addition, both groups of verbs inflected for aspect, distinguishing between perfective and imperfective aspect. The OT inflectional system seems to have been a local innovation, only marginally related to verb morphology of other Tibeto-Burman languages

Causative · Combinatorics · Inflection · Linguistics · Modal verb · Prefix · Reflexive verb · Semantics (computer science · Transitive relation · Verb · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations · Computer Science · Mathematics · Multilingual Education and Policy · Swearing, Euphemism, Multilingualism · Philosophy