An empathy-based approach to the description of the verb system of the Dege dialect of Tibetan

Abstract

The Tibetan verb system has attracted the attention of several linguists, who all have their own views on which approach or which terminology best describes the usage of the different auxiliaries and other verb markers. In the first section I will give a brief overview of three different lines of description and will compare them to each other. In the second section I will present the copulas and auxiliary verbs used in the Dege dialect to form complex verb forms. I will also discuss how the three approaches introduced in section one can be applied to the different examples from the Dege dialect, and will point out some of the advantages and difficulties involved. In the third section I will propose a new, empathy-based approach, which while enhancing the other analyses proposed so far, offers a wider frame of description, since it can also account for the "special" cases which other approaches have to treat separately.