Directives in rGyalrong Bola dialect

Abstract

This paper describes the directive prefixes and their syntactic functions in the Bola dialect of rGyalrong. rGyalrong is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the northwestern part of Sichuan Province, China. This language has attracted the attention of scholars since long because it has strikingly similar, even identical, shapes to some lexical items of written Tibetan. On the basis of this fact, some scholars have regarded rGyalrong as representing a substratum of Old Tibetan. It is true that the rGyalrong area and people have historically and culturally been under the strong influence of Tibet. However, Wolfenden and subsequent research revealed that the language has no direct genetic linguistic relationship with Tibetan and that it shares common features with the Qiangic languages. On the other hand, rGyalrong shares some characteristics with several subgroups of the Tibeto-Burman family and is thus considered one of the “link languages” that connect languages that are genetically interrelated. In this sense, a further approach to its typological features is indispensable. Among the syntactic features of rGyalrong, the complex structure of verb phrases has long attracted scholars' attention. For this reason, many Tibetologists have tended to recognize the parallelism of rGyalrong's system to the prefixes of the verb roots of Written Tibetan. Some people have asserted that this is a reflex of the Proto-Tibeto-Burman morphosyntax, and others have thought that it was a later development. This paper attempts to focus on directive prefixes and to determine where we should locate this language. The most characteristic feature of the directives of rGyalrong may be the fact that they are the markers of not only the direction that a particular verb root specifies, but also the tense and/or aspect. This phenomenon is observed among a limited number of Tibeto- Burman languages and might be reminiscent of Proto-Tibeto-Burman morphosyntax. This paper discusses this possibility.