16.454, Review: Morphology/Syntax/Lang Desc: Zeisler (2004)

[LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-16-454. Tue Feb 15 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.454, Review: Morphology/Syntax/Lang Desc: Zeisler (2004)

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Wayne State U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>
 
Reviews (reviews at linguistlist.org) 
        Sheila Collberg, U of Arizona  
        Terry Langendoen, U of Arizona  

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, Wayne
State University, and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomi at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

What follows is a review or discussion note contributed to our 
Book Discussion Forum. We expect discussions to be informal and 
interactive; and the author of the book discussed is cordially 
invited to join in. If you are interested in leading a book 
discussion, look for books announced on LINGUIST as "available 
for review." Then contact Sheila Collberg at collberg at linguistlist.org. 

===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 08-Feb-2005
From: Jakob Dempsey < jakob at saturn.yzu.edu.tw >
Subject: Relative Tense and Aspectual Values in Tibetan Languages 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 10:45:58
From: Jakob Dempsey < jakob at saturn.yzu.edu.tw >
Subject: Relative Tense and Aspectual Values in Tibetan Languages 
 

AUTHOR: Zeisler, Bettina 
TITLE: Relative Tense and Aspectual Values in Tibetan Languages 
SUBTITLE: A Comparative Study 
SERIES: Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 150
PUBLISHER: Mouton de Gruyter
YEAR: 2004 
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2883.html


Jakob Dempsey, Foreign Language Department, Yuan-ze University, Taiwan

The first one-quarter of the book is a theoretically-oriented introduction to 
the issues which take Tibetan as their focus in the major portion of the 
book. Among these issues are ways to conceptualise events, which include:
A) "Type of Actor" (presence or absence of Control, Agency, or Volition)
B) "Type of Event" - one breakdown would be: achievement ('to break'), 
accomplishment ('to grow up'), activity ('to flow'), and state ('to sit'). These 
categories can be morphemic alternations such as German or English 
jagen 'hunt' (activity) vs. erjagen 'hunt down' (achievement).
C) Absolute Tense vs. Relative Tense. The former includes divisions into 
past vs. non-past, past vs. present vs. future, and there may even be finer 
distinctions such as remote-past, recent past. etc. The latter was originally 
conceived to account for the Perfect in English and some related languages, 
and includes:  "taxis" (the temporal ordering of closely related events), vs. 
ordering vis-à-vis a contextually given reference point which may or may 
not be the same as the time of the speech-act, among other functions. 
D) Phase:  a way to classify verbal expressions by focusing on certain 
intervals in the development of the event; expressions may be prospective, 
inceptive, continuative, progressive (dynamism added), egressive, or 
completive. 
E) Quantification: classify events as distributive, iterative, habitual, etc. 
F) Aspect: Zeisler lists five "possible prototypical perspectives on the 
realisation of events": 
1) event as such - the totality
2) course/internal stages  
3) preparatory (external) 
4) result (external)
5) indefinite quantification (habitual, iterative etc.), and further defining 
Perfective as the marked (+totality) viewpoint vs. Imperfective, the 
unmarked (0-totality) viewpoint. e.g. Russian "Dokazyval no ne 
dokazal"  "He tried to prove (Impf) but didn't (Pftv)". (Zeisler reminds us that 
applying this Slavic system to other languages can result in confusion, for 
example, in the Romance languages there is an opposition of, e.g. the 
French imparfait vs. the Passé Composé which is "commonly accepted ... in 
terms of Aspect [but] ... turns out to be a complex of aspectual, temporal, 
modal, as well as pragmatic functions".)
G) Framing: marked (+internal perspective) vs. unmarked (holistic 
perspective). This category is illustrated by the English "expanded form" 
construction ( is/was ...ing), which is informationally marked and can serve 
as a Frame for an event with open interval. 

Zeisler discusses these concepts, and how they interact with TAM (Tense, 
Aspect, Mood) in Ancient Greek, the Romance languages, Literary Arabic, 
English, Russian, Bulgarian and other languages, but the limited nature of 
this review suggests we should focus on these issues as discussed in the 
major, Tibetan-oriented, part of the book.

Part II, "the Tibetan system of Relative Tense and aspectual values" starts off 
with a classification of Tibetan within Tibeto-Burman, but based on a rather 
old source; the inclusion of Lepcha as a close relative of Tibetan is probably 
erroneous, cf. Bradley 1997, which also rearranges Zeisler's subdivisions of 
Tibetan. Her suggestion of a close connection between Old Tibetan 
(evidenced from early documents) and north-eastern or Amdo Tibetan is 
intriguing, and would suggest something about the movements of ethnic 
groups early on in Tibetan history. 

This reviewer should remind the reader that the comments expressed here 
are from the viewpoint of a general-background scholar in Tibetan 
linguistics with a particular interest in Lhasa Tibetan, who also has a desire 
to learn something about the specialist studies in Tibetan verbal systems 
which Zeisler has undertaken; the deep understanding of theoretical issues 
in the first part of the book coupled with a familiarity and personal 
investigation of many varieties of Tibetan, modern and ancient, is an 
achievement which perhaps belongs uniquely to Zeisler among the global 
community of language scholars. 

Zeisler devotes quite a few pages to analyzing and explaining the 
phonologies and transcription-systems she will be using. In matters of a 
preferred transliteration for Tibetan, it is probably useless to assert that 
one's own is less confusing or more rational, one can never satisfy 
everybody. For Lhasa Tibetan, she takes the slightly centralised high front 
and back vowels, transcribed in Chang & Shefts as e and o (both with raised 
dot above) as non-phonemic, but that is not really the case in this type of 
Lhasa speech which she is taking as her main source. I would agree with her 
about the shortcomings in phonetic accuracy of Goldstein's extensive 
publications on modern Tibetan. 

This section also introduces us to the Tibetan verb, which lacks components 
related to mood, voice, person, or number. Instead, there is a fundamental 
division into verbs representing controlled or intended action and those 
representing accidental or nonvolitional action. We are introduced to the 
different possible stems of the Classical Tibetan verb -- four at the most, 
where A is the unmarked stem, expressing simultaneity vs. stem B which 
expresses anteriority; stems C and D express modal concepts. In presenting 
such material, I think Zeisler's approach is a little too abstract to be a proper 
guide for many readers: for example, at the very point of first opening the 
discussion about the four verb stems, it would be helpful to give a short list 
or little table of some common examples, so the reader could see some 
concrete depiction of what is under discussion. 

Part II contains a large section dealing with verbal forms in Old and Classical 
Tibetan. Compound constructions, with some sort of auxiliary after the 
verb-stem, are not as nearly common here as they become in later Tibetan, 
but already can be seen. Zeisler bids us look more carefully at the semantic 
content inherent in the suffixes, for example "bsad-par-'ong" would not 
just be another kind of future expression, but specifically "is going to [have] 
you killed." Her analysis of the Simple Future in these texts reminds one of a 
common use in Lhasa Tibetan: a deliberate decision of the speaker to act, 
also often carrying the connotation that one is morally or socially obliged to 
act, thus laws, precepts and prohibitions are often expressed with this 
Simple Future.  Under #275 in this section, it seems the phrase "ensnaring 
deer" should be changed to "ensnared deer".  Zeisler concludes this section 
stating that "the stems of Old and Classical Tibetan can be best described in 
terms of Tense-R [relative tense] and Mood." Thus not in terms of Aspect or 
Framing. In terms of Tense-R, "the present stem is positively marked for 
simultaneity", whereas the simple past stem is "aspectually...unmarked", and 
not expressive of Absolute Tense (Tense-A). 

By the time that we get to modern dialects, such as Lhasa Tibetan, the 
widespread conflation of the old separate stems leaves the differentiation of 
Tense-A, Phase/Quant (Quantification) and Mood as the job of 
compounded verbal constructions. The introduction of Aspect, to be 
connected with ergative agent marking in past tense constructions, leads, 
as Zeisler states, to more confusion and muddle than it helps; an article by 
this reviewer pointed out years ago that the role of ergative marking is 
much broader than this, whether in Lhasa speech or in earlier semi-
colloquial writings. 

Zeisler's "phonemic transcription" of Lhasa Tibetan contains some 
inaccuracies or misleading representations: e.g. p.472 "sha-'di zo!" (Eat this 
meat!). I would agree with Zeisler that the falling contour on the 
imperative "zo" is better attributed to sentence intonation, and should not 
be marked the way it is in the Chang and Shefts publications, but the vowel 
is short; this example also includes a peculiar marker of Zeisler's, a sort of 
dislocated integral sign which is supposed  to indicate "non-phonemic 
suprasegmental features due to sentence intonation". Frankly, I don't see 
the point of this device: for example, p. 495 has this symbol appearing in 
the midst of "paa-lags" ( father <honorific> ); Zeisler's transcription has a 
falling tone on the second syllable, which is not appropriate since it is 
completely unstressed, the vowel in "paa" is long simply because that is the 
form of the word, there is no "prosodic trick" which can relate it to the short-
vowel written form. 

Further down on the same page, the high-toned "ni" , which frequently 
occurs at the end of phrases in spoken Lhasa Tibetan, is also marked with 
this split-integral; I suspect that Zeisler is assuming the word is basically the 
written "ni", which should be low-tone, so "something prosodic" must be 
making it high-tone. Aside from the fact that this is simply the expected 
tone for this morpheme in Lhasa Tibetan, there being thus no need 
to "explain" its relationship to any written form, the historical antecedent is 
more likely to have been "a.ni / e.ni"  which still pops up all over the place in 
Lhasa sentences and has the high tone already in place in the second 
syllable.  -  In her transcription Zeisler has certain syllables spaced 
completely apart, others written together, and others connected by a dash, 
but the rules for such spellings are not at all clear and can in some cases be 
quite misleading unless the reader is already quite familiar with Lhasa 
Tibetan. 

For example, why does the unstressed genitive marker -khi get placed off 
with a dash, but the unstressed dative marker -la gets stuck right onto the 
noun it follows? (p. 473) Also, it seems that Zeisler's system marks the tone 
on the first syllable of a disyllabic unit, and then the second syllable's tone is 
predictable. Example #341b starts out with "ngarang", where we can predict 
the low tone indicated on the first syllable to be followed by a raised (fairly 
level) tone on the second, but later on we have "zaga:" (I have modified her 
symbols for the sake of electronic transmission) where, with the same tone-
markings, we would expect the same tonal pattern on the second syllable, 
but actually it is completely different, it is unstressed and low-tone. Why? 
Because the connection between the syllables in "ngarang" is a close 
juncture found within syntactic words, whereas the connection between "za" 
and '"ga:" is a loose juncture found between syntactic words within a 
phrase. This is obvious from #341c on the next page where, in "phebs-ga:" 
(my retranscription) the tone on the first syllable is falling (as it would be in 
pause-final) instead of leveled out as it would be in close juncture, 
e.g. "phebs.ki-red". If one connects syllables with two kinds of juncture-
markers (I use a mid-raised dot vs. a dash) then the sentence structure and 
the phonology are both clearer; so for example p. 482 #358 should 
be "gjap-nä", the second syllable is quite unstressed, not falling tone as she 
has it. The same goes for the ergative "-gis" suffix in #359 (p.483). On the 
other hand, for example p.491 #375, in "byas-byas.par" the first two 
syllables should, in Zeisler's system, be written together with no dash since 
they are in close juncture: the first syllable's falling tone is leveled out. 
Zeisler's linkage of the three syllables implies the opposite of the facts.

After this critical "excursus" on Lhasa phonology, let us, as far as this 
reviewer is able, say a few more words about Zeisler's treatment of verbs in 
various modern dialects. The Lhasa Tibetan section shows us at least 18 
different types of verbal constructions, expressing prospective, experiential 
past, "coming onto the scene", past habitual etc. It is not very easy to find 
one's way around among all these types, a problem we will consider more 
below. - The Lhasa section cites a number of sentences with verbal 
expressions ending in "-'dug", but it is doubtful whether any of these can 
be taken as real Lhasa speech: they do not occur in the Chang and Shefts 
corpus, nor in Wang 1994.  The Lhasa forms would be: stem +  -'dug  > -
zhag, stem + -ki + 'dug > .kiq (falling tone), stem + -pa + 'dug > -pa: .  
Forms with 'dug only appear in negative or interrogative constructions. 

The next section in Part II, on the Eastern dialects, is longer than the Lhasa 
section, but we will only look at it briefly here. Verbs in these dialects have 
preserved the original Present stem, "but it has taken over all functions of 
the future stem."  A distinctive feature of Eastern dialects is that the 
nomonaliser "-pa" is replaced by "-le" (Kham) and "-n?" (Amdo), e.g. "brjod-
pa-red" (said) > "dze-leq". Zeisler mainly compares one northern Kham 
dialect (Nangchenpa) and two of the Amdo group (Rebkong and 
Themchen). Verbal behavior shows similarities to Lhasa: present tense 
constructions are zero-marked for Tense-A, and in terms of Tense-R the 
past stem is marked for anteriority, but the simple past is not commonly 
seen, more limited to a perfective use. 

Part III of the book, dealing with Western Tibetan, could be called the Main 
Course, both from its size and from the perspective of Zeisler's personal 
research background. She earlier carried out a major research project on an 
oral epic transcribed in this area (Lower Ladakh), and has done on-the-
scene field work recording several Tibetan dialects in this area; she presents 
us with a very thorough survey of the literature on West Tibetan dialects, 
and displays an equal mastery in discussing the phonological variations 
across the dialects. The West Tibetan verb shows a primary opposition 
between present and past stem, but in a sense they are hardly 
different "stems", since the past form has become generalised as merely 
adding an "-s" to the present stem, at least for controlled action verbs. This 
group of dialects is also distinguished by having widespread use of 
an "Aesthetive subject": dative/locative marker with transitive accidental 
event verbs, only rarely found in Lhasa Tibetan. Zeisler has good reason to 
suspect this may be due to Indo-Aryan/Dardic influence. As she points 
out, "Western Tibetan varieties show the most extensive differentiation of 
constructions": this part of the book thus contains quite a long list of 
different verbal forms, with many examples from Balti, Ladakhi and other 
dialects. 

Finally, Part IV gives us a comparative recapitulation, for example, "in terms 
of Framing....none of the four stems would be marked for the +internal 
perspective." There is an extensive discussion about possible "potentalis" 
implications in the imperative form. Zeisler attempts to solve the problem 
about the original function of the past stem: if it were neither aspectual, nor 
modal, nor temporal....then what? She revives an older theory that the "b-" 
prefix associated with the past stem may derive from an early verb *ba (to 
do), which leads to the possibility that the d-/g- prefix of stem form C is 
not merely directional (cf. Wolfenden) but could have been derived from a 
separate verb. There is a lot of additional material on different types of 
complementary verbs, expressing movement, transfer, deposition etc. but 
there is no space here to discuss details. 

An unfortunate shortcoming at the end of the volume is the lack of any 
index to the various  topics discussed in the book. There is an index to the 
various researchers and where they are cited discussing various broad 
topics in the text, but with such a large book (nearly a thousand pages), and 
so many technical terms and different grammatical topics covered, there is a 
critical need to be able to locate just where such terms were first and then 
later used, just where one could find information, spread across the various 
dialects, on this or that topic. I would hope that Zeisler could spend some 
time and generate such an index of perhaps 3 or 4 pages which could be 
kept next to the back cover by the reader.

Although English does not seem to be her native language, the language 
throughout the volume is clearly written and showing good mastery of 
technical terms, with only the occasional peculiarity. 

Nowadays a great amount of research on Tibetan is written in Chinese; I 
would recommend that where possible, Zeisler consult such sources more. 
For example, the large grammar of spoken Lhasa Tibetan (Wang 1994) 
would have been profitably consulted for many of the discussions in 
Zeisler's book.

REFERENCES

Bradley, David 1997. "Tibeto-Burman Languages and Classification" , Pacific 
Linguistics Series A-86. Dept. of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and 
Asian Studies, Australian National University

Chang, Betty Shefts and Chang, Kun 1978-1981. Spoken Tibetan Texts. 
Taipei : Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica.

Wang, Zhi-jing 1994. A Grammar of Colloquial Lhasa Tibetan [in Chinese]. 
Beijing:  Central Minorities University.

Yu Dao-quan et al. 1980. Tibetan-Chinese (Lhasa Colloquial) Dictionary [in 
Chinese and Tibetan]. Beijing: Min-zu chu-ban-she. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Jakob Dempsey: M.A. in Tibetan linguistics and folk-literature, Ph.D. in Asian 
Linguistics (Sino-Tibetan historical phonology) - both from University of 
Washington, Seattle. Since 1997 on faculty of Department of Foreign 
Languages, Yuan-ze University, Taiwan. Research papers on Tibeto-Burman 
and Old Chinese phonology as well as the Tibetan language. Currently 
doing a funded project translating Wang 1994 into English. This nearly 600-
page grammar of Lhasa Tibetan has no equivalent in European-language 
material.





-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-16-454