Verbal Morphology of Amdo Tibetan
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Date
2020-02-27
Authors
Tribur, Zoe
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This dissertation describes the functional and structural properties of the Amdo Tibetan verb system. Amdo Tibetan (Tibetic, Trans-Himalayan) is a verb-final language, characterized by an elaborate system of post-verbal morphology that are limited to finite clauses and which encode information about the nature of the assertion.
Aside from imperative mood, which is expressed by a different series of constructions, the finite verb constructions of Amdo Tibetan form a morphological paradigm expressing functions associated with the semantic domains of tense, aspect, (epistemic) modality, evidentiality and egophoricity.
The data included in this study comes from three kinds of sources. The majority of examples are from my own field recordings, which include elicitations as well as spontaneous speech. I also make use of data from other linguistic publications, including two second language textbooks. My own data as well as these other sources reflect a high degree of dialectal (and register) variation which is characteristic of Amdo Tibetan. As will be apparent, my data shows a diversity of phonologies, morphosyntax, lexical items and even some functional categories. Consequently, this dissertation also serves as a cross-dialectal comparative study.
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Keywords
Amdo, Egophoricity, Evidentiality, Morphosyntax, Tibetan, Trans-Himalayan