Lingzi Zhuang (Toronto Mississauga) - A preliminary “mix-ology” of messy Tibetan verb paradigms
Channel: Nathan Hill
Date: 2023-04-15

This talk treats the origins of “mixed and slightly messy” verb paradigms in Tibetan. A non-trivial subset of Tibetan verb paradigms display various forms of irregularity and as-yet poorly explained root alternation, including ablaut (Hill 2010, 2019; Jacques 2012; Bialek 2020), immutable g-prefixation (Zhuang 2022), and initial voicing alternation which supposedly, but not always, correlates with transitivity (Uray 1953; Hill 2014; Bialek 2020). This landscape is further complicated by inconsistencies across lexicographical and dialectal data sources. The talk presents ongoing research which seeks to argue that this apparent messiness can be explained in a principled way, namely, as the result of suppletion operating on previously underrecognized morphological/semantic processes and plausibly much older root alternations.

Lingzi Zhuang is an Assistant Professor at University of Toronto Mississauga. His main areas are semantics, pragmatics, and Sino-Tibetan linguistics. He is interested in formal approaches to types of meaning, their variation across languages and across semantic phenomena, and their mechanisms of diachronic change. While the theoretical arm of his work focuses on speech act-level phenomena (evidentiality, mirativity, attitudinal expressions) and nominal reference, he maintains an areal-historical specialty in Sino-Tibetan languages of the Himalayas and China, and works on issues in Bodish reconstruction.