From Nominalisation to Passive in Old Tibetan

Reconstructing Grammatical Meaning in an Extinct Language 1

Bibliographic Data

ID19230772
AuthorsJoanna Bialek (0000-0001-8542-4272, Trinity College Dublin Dublin Ireland, corresponding author)
Year2026
Publication date2026-02-19
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransactions of the Philological Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0079-1636 • E-ISSN: 1467-968X
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1467-968x.70019
OpenAlexW7130543548
LanguageEN
References cited26

Based on an analysis of the Old Literary Tibetan corpus—a corpus of the oldest documented Tibetic language—the present study provides evidence that literary Tibetan v3 verb stems (commonly termed ‘future’) initially encoded passive voice. New arguments put forward in this article range from Trans‐Himalayan nominal morphology to early Tibetan practices in translating Sanskrit to the pragmatics of v3 in Old Literary Tibetan and are additionally buttressed by the modern understanding of the passive voice as established by comparative studies and linguistic typology. The reconstructed grammaticalisation path from the Proto‐Tibetic nominaliser *g‐ via resultative participle towards passive marker agrees with a pattern well established cross‐linguistically and ultimately confirms the analysis of v3 stems as passive

Grammaticalization · Historical linguistics · Lexicalization · Meaning (existential) · Participle · Pragmatics · Resultative · Verb · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Linguistics and Cultural Studies · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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