A preliminary discussion of subject marking (byed-sgra) in Lhasa Tibetan

Abstract

One of the puzzling grammatical questions that inevitably confronts any student of the Lhasa Tibetan dialect is when to use a subject-marker or "byed-sgra".1 Over the past few years. I have made it my goal to understand the grammatical function of the byed-sgra case marker more completely. In this effort, I have excerpted and analyzed all the examples from Tibetan by Radio, a textbook published by the Tibetan People's Press.2 In this paper. I will present some tentative rules that seem to account for the occurrence of the byed-sgra case marker, in hopes of stimulating a discussion among colleagues in the field of Tibetology.