Traces of Clause-Final Demonstratives in Old Tibetan1
Traces of Clause-Final Demonstratives in Old Tibetan1 Marius Zemp (University of Bern, Switzerland) 1. Introduction he Purik member of the Tibetic language family is spoken in the western periphery of the Tibetic linguistic area. In Purik, T two demonstratives, de ‘that’ and e ‘the other’, occur not only pre- and pronominally, but also post- and proverbally, in which case they take scope over the sentence they terminate. The proverbal de, oc- curring instead of an existential predicate, locates an entity or property in the topical situation (which typically corresponds to the interlocu- tors’ current one). The postverbal de, occurring after a full-fledged sen- tence, has the effect of laying out the information conveyed by this sen- tence, inviting the addressee to retrace it, and implying that it should be clear. By contrast, pro- and postverbal e points to information that requires a shift of attention. The present paper demonstrates that Old Tibetan (OT) ga re ‘where is (X)?’, clause-linking (s)te ~ de, and V-ta re ‘lest (it) will V’, and other phenomena found in written and spoken Tibetic varieties, are best un- derstood if analysed as traces of the mentioned clause-final demon- stratives. The comparative study of spoken Tibetic varieties thus not only contributes to our understanding of particular OT texts, but also sheds light on the development and dispersion of Tibetic during the Imperial Period (7th–9th centuries CE). Purik is a phonologically archaic Tibetic variety spoken in the Purik area of Kargil district which, on 31 October 2019, came under the Un- ion Territory of Ladakh, India.
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