A Study Of Tense,aspect And Modality In Gtsangpaba Dialect Of Cone Tibetan

Gtsangpaba township is located in the northeastern part of Cone county,and its Tibetan dialect belongs to the farthest tentacle of the northeastern extension of the Kham Tibetan,which is a language island surrounded by Amdo Tibetan and Chinese dialects.Time,aspect and modality(TAM)are the important grammatical categories related to verbs.These belong to the closed grammatical function category,which cannot create new words like content words and have systematic stability.In this dissertation,we research TAM in Gtsangpaba dialect from fieldwork.The first chapter is about background of the chosen topic,research methodology and literature review.The second chapter is an overview of the Tibetan language,which is divided into people and geography,phonology,and lexical features.The third chapter trys discussing the tense in Gtsangpaba dialect.There are a small number of verbs retain a relative tense category of past,present,and future morphological changes relative to the point of reference in the utterance.The fourth chapter try to reveal the aspect of Gtsangpaba dialect,which is divided into eight groups: prospective,imminent,progressive,durative,imperfective,perfect,perfective,and dirational.The fifth chapter is about the modality of Gtsangpaba Tibetan dialect,which is mainly expressed by modal verbs and sentence-final particles.The former in Gtsangpaba Tibetan dialect can be divided into three systems: epistemic,denotic and dynamic.The latter,as the sentence-final particles,also indicate three parts: donetic modality,evidential modality and inferential modality.The last chapter concludes with a summary of the general features of Gtsangpaba dialect in terms of TAM.The Gtsangpaba Tibetan dialect is similar to other Tibetan dialects in terms of the general features about TAM,but the marking forms and means are much different.TAM can reveal the unique grammatical features of a language or dialect.The study of this dissertation chould provide a profile of the features and nature in Gtsangpaba dialect.