Old Tibetan verb morphology and semantics: An attempt at a reconstruction

Abstract

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 Trans-Himalayan languages.

The development of zl in Tibetic languages

“…There are a number of issues with Hahn's account, most notably that it struggles to account for instances of zl in nouns, since verbal and nominal instances of zl do not have diverging MoT reflexes. Hahn's analysis of verbal prefixes in Table 7 receive some support in more recent literature on ot morphology: there is a consensus that s-/z-expressed transitivity (Bialek, 2020;Jacques, 2020;Hill, 2023), but I have found no other analysis that treats d-as verbalizing.4 In any case, by tying the underlying phonological content of zl to verbal morphology, Hahn's account fails to account more generally for the development of zl. Hahn argues that orthographic restrictions forbade dl and zdl, leading scribes to write the initial clusters in /d-log/ and /z-d-log/ as ld and zl.…”

“…Analyses for the function of ot d-include marking the imperfective, passivizing, and transitivizing, with the latter two analyzed as allomorphs for g-(Bialek, 2020;Zhuang, 2022).Downloaded from Brill.com 06/03/2024 09:01:40PM via Open Access. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.…”

bcan pos who were not khri: Royal titulature and the succession to the throne in the Tibetan Empire

“…For the remaining bcan pos, inscriptional but also post-imperial evidence has to be included in the analysis. 26 See Bialek (2020a) for the inflectional morphology of OLT verbs. The verb root √ʦa was most probably a denominal stem derived from cha "offspring".…”

“… 26 See Bialek (2020a) for the inflectional morphology of OLT verbs. The verb root √ʦa was most probably a denominal stem derived from cha “offspring”.…”

Emergence of the honorific register in Tibetic languages

“…The latter then requires the receiver argument in absolutive -a morphologically unmarked case. This special construction is treated in more detail in Bialek (2023b).…”