The Structure and Hierarchy of Sentence-endings in Tibetan Language

Abstract

This paper discusses the structure and hierarchy of sentence-endings in Tibetan language. Tibetan sentence-endings are hierarchical. They can be divided into two levels from the perspectives of structure, distribution and expressive function. The first level comes after the predicate or verb phrase, indicating the category of tense/aspect/mood (TAM). The second level, which follows a self-sufficient sentence, mainly expresses the meaning of the speaker’s hint, inference, evaluation and attitude to the information. Each level includes several different types of endings, which act on different syntactic categories or manifest different degrees of subjectivity. The lower the degree of correlation between the endings and the information of the self-sufficient sentence is, the higher the corresponding semantic category and the speaker’s subjective participation are. Some lower-level endings can also express the grammatical meaning of the higher level in certain context with increasing subjectivity.