Himalayan Linguistics

This paper represents a departure from traditional Tibetan grammar in terms of the classification of verbs, for it constructs verb types and relevant syntactic rules based on syntax and semantics. The paper further distinguishes twelve types of Tibetan verbs according to the numbers of different arguments and the requirements of different syntactic properties. Therefore, the classification of the syntax and semantics of verbs Permits a detailed and overall reflection of the syntactic framework of all sorts of all kinds of Tibetan clause constructions, including word orders, case markers and syntactic particles. All the findings of syntactic and semantic classifications of Tibetan verbs can be applied directly to build a Tibetan grammatical information dictionary which is the infrastructure of natural Tibetan language processing.