The Martin Centre held its 61st seminar on Appliable Linguistics (127th seminar on language science and system science) on 19 March 2021. Dr Wang Pin from the Centre gave a talk entitled ‘Nominal Group Systems and Structures in Lhasa Tibetan’.
        In the talk, Dr Wang presented a text-based study of the construal of entities through nominal groups in Lhasa Tibetan based on a focus text selected from a local folk tale. The study approaches the grammatical description of nominal group systems and structures from ideational and textual perspectives, taking as point of departure the discourse semantic systems of ideation and identification. From the perspective of ideation, nominal groups construe entities that realise items in field, which are classified or composed, with or without associated properties. From the perspective of identification, nominal groups either present or presume the identity of entities in discourse. In terms of nominal group grammatical functions, the nucleus of a Lhasa Tibetan nominal group is a Thing, which enters into multivariate structure with post-Thing functions including Classifier, Epithet, Quantity, Perspective, Deictic and Function Marking, and pre-Thing functions Qualifier and Embedding Marking. In terms of word classes realising these functions, Lhasa Tibetan nominal groups involve nouns, pronouns, adjectives, numerals, quantifiers, determiners and clitics. The description also deals with complexing and embedding.
        This paper is the most recent one of Dr Wang’s grammatical descriptions of Tibetan.