Traces of clause-final demonstratives in Old Tibetan

Zemp, Marius (2021). Traces of clause-final demonstratives in Old Tibetan. Revue d’études tibétaines(60), pp. 398-438. CNRS

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The Purik member of the Tibetic language family is spoken in the western periphery of the Tibetic linguistic area. In Purik, 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, occurring instead of an existential predicate, locates an entity or property in the topical situation (which typically corresponds to the interlocutors’ current one). The postverbal de, occurring after a full-fledged sentence, has the effect of laying out the information conveyed by this sentence, 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 understood if analysed as traces of the mentioned clause-final demonstratives. 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).

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