Negation in rGyalrong

Abstract

This paper outlines the morphological system of negation and related morphosyntactic phenomena in the Bola dialect of rGyalrong. rGyalrong is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the northwestern part of Sichuan Province, China. This language has long attracted the attention of scholars because it has strikingly similar, even identical, shapes to some lexical items of Written Tibetan. On the basis of this fact, some scholars regarded rGyalrong as representing a substratum of Old Tibetan. It is true that rGyalrong area and people have been under the strong influence of Tibet historically and culturally. However, Wolfenden and consequent researches revealed that the language has no direct genetic relation with Tibetan linguistically and that it shares common features with the Qiangic languages. On the other hand, however, rGyalrong shares some characteristics with several subgroups of the Tibeto-Burman family and thus is considered as one of the link languages which connect languages that have genetic relations among them. In this sense, a further approach to its typological features is indispensable. Among the syntactic features of rGyalrong, its complex structure of verb phrase attracted scholars' attention for a long time. This is the reason why many Tibetologists tended to recognize the parallelism of rGyalrong's system to the prefixes of verb roots of Written Tibetan. Some people asserted that it is a reflex of Proto-Tibeto-Burman morphosyntax, and some others thought that it is a later development. Concretely, the verb phrase structure of this language can be generalized as: VPfinal → P1- P2 - P3 - P4 - P5 - ROOT - (s) - S1 Negation is specified at the P1 position. P1 is the mood marker, which represents the speaker's attitude toward and judgment of the state and/or the other party. It may contain question, order, negation, supposition and optative. In the previous works of this language, the negation marker was constantly mV-shaped. For instance, Lin (1993), the first comprehensive grammar of lCogtse dialect, describes two negation markers, ma (mɐ) and mə, explaining their distribution and functions. All the recent descriptions have followed Lin. However, I found ǰa- and ǰi-, beside ma-. This paper gropes for their synchronic usage and historical origin.