Syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic-epistemic functions of auxiliaries in Western Tibetan

Abstract

There are two basic auxiliary verbs for `to be' which seem to be used in all Tibetan varieties including, of course, Written Tibetan (WT). In terms of WT, one yin and the other is yod. In a sentence they occur either as finite verb forms (usually in final position), or enter as auxiliary morphemes into complex predicate structures. In this paper, only the first usage will be exemplified.