Sino-tibetan Language Judgment

This dissertation is a monograph about the determinative sentence (DS) in the languages of Sino-Tibetan family (ST). The purpose of such a study is to understand the essence of the DS, analyze its character in form, meaning and function, realize its value for linguistic typology study, and describe the process and rule of its developmentOne of the innovations of this paper is viewing the DS as a kind of grammatical construction, which is used by speakers to express their subjective judgment about the relationship between objects. After being attested in the ST languages, there are noun DS and copula DS, sometimes also auxiliary-word DS.The copulas in the DS could be classified into joint copula and judgment copula. The copulas in the ST language have derived from different origin and have less genetically relation. The most copulas in the ST don't have the same grammatical category as verbs. Pragmatically, copulas act as markers indicating speakers'judgment and sometimes as markers on focuses or topics.Although it is approximately harmonious to the basic words order of languages, the DS is essentially a topic-comment structure which is different from a subject-predicate structure. This is revealed in the ST languages by some kinds of extensive morphology. The copula DS, which resulted from the harmonization of topic-comment structure and subject-predicate structure in a language system has more qualities of topic-comment structure than the nounand auxiliary-word ones, According to the DS, the ST is wholly topic-prominent languages.In this paper the course and law of the diachronic development and change of the DS are illustrated through studying Chinese DS. In the Xianqin Age, therewas an important construction development of the Chinese DS-the copulashi comes out The copula shi is the result of grammatical analogy and wei comes from a verb, each one representing a grammaticalization approach of copulaThe DS is apt to language influence due to language contact, just as showed by some cases related to Chinese and Tibetan, because the DS construction is isomorphic in different languages and subjective on pragmatics. The influence of the DS between languages shows itself as loading, superposition and admixture.This paper is involved in the theories and methods of formalism, functionalism, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. The study is put into practice synchronically and diachronically, descriptively and explicatively, externally and internally, singularly and contrastingly. Additionally, questionnaire and statistics are adopted to demonstrate the usage of the DS.