Interrelationship of Existential Verbs and Evidentiality in Modern Tibetan
In Tibetan and some languages deeply influenced by Tibetan,existential verbs have the function of expressing evidentiality,which is one of the prominent characteristics that distinguish Tibetan language from other Tibeto-Burman languages.However,the significant differences of its morphological and syntactic operations among Tibetan dialects have not attracted enough attention in previous studies.In terms of the number of verb stems,Tibetan varieties often contain one stem,double stems and three stems of existential verbs,and the cases of four stems are rare.Syntactically,existential verbs not only act as lexical verbs,but also further grammaticalize into auxiliary verbs.The affirmative,negative and interrogative mood of sentences,as well as language contact,all have an important impact on whether existential verbs act as lexical verbs or auxiliary verbs expressing evidentiality.Such semantic and syntactic differences are also the main difference of existential verbs in different Tibetan dialects.In view of this,the investigation of evidentiality category conveyed by existential verbs in Tibetan must take into account the factors such as mood,negation,syntactic functions,and language contact,otherwise it is difficult to comprehensively investigate its characteristics.
万方数据
维普
