A comparative study of nominal group systems and structures between Lhasa Tibetan and Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

This paper presents a text-based comparative study of the construal of entities through nominal groups in Lhasa Tibetan and Mandarin Chinese. It approaches the grammatical description of nominal groups from the ideational and textual perspectives, and gives priority to the perspective “from above”, taking as point of departure the discourse semantic systems of ideation and identification. From the perspective of ideation, the comparison focuses on the classification, description and quantification of entities. From the perspective of identification, the comparison focuses on the presentation or presumption of entities in discourse, and the determination and qualification of them. In terms of grammatical realisations, the nucleus function of a nominal group, Thing, enters into multivariate structures with a range of pre- and post-Thing functions. However, configuration and realisation of the functions are language-specific. This study makes explicit structural consequences of systemic choices in nominal group grammar, and attends to the problem of structural markers, drawing on the notion of “subjacency” structure proposed in Martin et al. (2021) and Martin and Doran (this issue).