A Typological Study On Possession Structure Of Tibeto-burman

The category of possession is an important topic in the study of grammar and one Tof the most important functional categories in human language life.In recent years,it is a popular research method to conduct cross-language comparative research based on the theory of linguistic typology,to investigate the commonalities and differences between languages from the perspective of typology,to describe and summarize diversified linguistic phenomena and facts,and to look into the changes of language forms.This article is based on the basis of forefathers’ research,takes Tibeto-Burman languages as the research object,on the basis of corpus that from "Chinese language"(2007)written by Sun Hongkai and “Brief Annals of Chinese Minority Languages Series” written by National Ethnic Affairs Commission.Observe from the synchronic level,describes word order type,encode methods,semantic types of nominal possessive structure and predicate possessive structure thoroughly.In addition to the introduction and conclusion,this paper includes two parts:The second chapter mainly investigates the encode methods of the possessive structure in Tibeto-Burman languages.Firstly,the bacis word order of Tibeto-Burman is investigated,which is the unmarked word order pattern of each core component at clause level.Among the Tibeto-Burman languages,except the white and Karen languages,which are SVO type languages,most of them are SOV type languages which are relatively harmonious inside.Therefore,the predicate possessive structure is mainly arranged according to the word order of SOV,that is,the corresponding part of the verb is preceded by the subordinate part and the existential predicate is preceded by the subordinate part.According to the list of "Related Compilation" of Dryer(1992)about basic word order,it can be seen that in Tibeto-Burman languages dominated by OV word order,the corresponding component of object belongs to attributive language tends to be placed in front of noun.Secondly,the second chapter focuses on the Tibeto-Burman languages possessive structure encode methods.The encoding of nominal possessive structure can be divided into two types from surface structure: the type of juxtaposition and conjunction marker.The difference is whether there is the involvement of the claim marker.The juxtaposition type can be divided into three types: zero morphologic type,internal inflection type and core word marker type.Conjunctive marker types are further divided into three types: zero form,syntactic type and core word marker types.It can be seen that Tibeto-Burman languages have diversity in the choice of encoding methods of nominal possessive structure.Among them,no matter what kind of semantic relationship is based on,which uses the juxtaposition or conjunction marker type only belongs to tunitary coding language.In addition,the rest of the languages are distributed all kinds of encoding methods,which belong to dichotomous coding languages.The purpose of distinguishing unitary and dichotomous languages is to explore the influence of transferability of ownership semantic relations on coding methods.There are some languages in Tibeto-Burman that are transitioning from the type of juxtaposition to the type of conjunction marker,which indicates that their grammatical types are developing from inflectional to analytical.The encode methods of predicate possessive structure are mainly divided into the types of transitive and dative.Existential verbs in transitive encode method usually have two semantic sources: "possession" meaning and "existence" meaning.It is a typical predicate possessive structure based on the meaning of "possession".In terms of semantic type,the meaning of "existence" is generally locational possession,which is an atypical predicate possessive structure.The expressive strategy of dative encoding is usually to judgment sentences,in which the possessor is coded as a paralegative,indexed by the end/beneficiary or receiver,and the possessed is coded as the subject or topic of the clause.The third chapter mainly investigates the semantic types of the possessive structure in Tibeto-Burman.Typologies of Nominal possessive structure are desceibed by exploring whether its possessors distinguish between pronouns and nouns,human and non-human.Again based on the principle of distance iconicity by investigating each possessors in various languages on the encoding the choice of frequency and degree of intimacy for P and N build a dominance hierarchy,which included in the framework of "transferable-non-transferable",further explore the looming law of possessive auxiliary word in nominal possessive structure,complete the cognitive mechanism of nominal possessive structures.Through the analysis,it can be seen thatthe higher the degree of life of the possessor,the easier it is to be the possessor,and the lower the degree of life,the more inclined it is to be the possessed.However,the statistical data show that in the Tibeto-Burman languages,transferability as discriminative encoding is not a distinct coercive coding method for the vast majority of Tibeto-Burman languages.In the part of speech in the discussion of semantic type in predicate structure,the author first focus on the existential verbs system,and divides the typology about it.It is often referred to in according to the nature of the different use different verb,by the nature of its existence predicates,partition type,scope,environment to determine the semantic type of choice.It is often semantically expressed as "N1 possess N2" or "N1has N2".In Tibeto-Burman languages,"with/in the" type of verbs with the language have the same form is the norm,pridicate possessive structure of the SOV language is often characterized by" space exists noun + subject + verb "/" existing object +noun + verb "locations,they are generally based on the concept of the same model,namely the space relationship.This can also be further evidence,space relationship in the broad sense also belong to the category of" a kind of special semantic relations.As for the archetypal semantic relationship of predicate possessive structure,different verbs will be used along with the category characteristics of existence phenomenon and scope of use,which will not be discussed in this section for the time being due to space limitation.The conclusion part,based on the typology perspective,summarizes the generality and individuality of the possessive structure of Tibeto-Burman languages.