Ebook: On the Structure of Nominal Phrases in Dzongkha

San Diego State University, San Diego, 2010, 44 p.Диссертация по синтаксису языка дзонг-кэ.Very little is known about the syntactic structure of Dzongkha, the national language
of Bhutan. Furthermore, no published work has attempted to account for the structure of this
vulnerable language using a theory of syntax. The purpose of this paper is to document the
syntactic structure of nominal phrases in Dzongkha, focusing on the isolated nominal phrase
(though discourse situations do arise and are addressed). Drawing on information related to
the placement in the phrase, what can and cannot co-occur, as well as the semantic scope of
the different modifiers, this paper analyzes the structural hierarchy using the Minimalist
Program as the syntactic theory of choice. All the data used has been collected from a single
native speaker of Dzongkha who was born and raised in western Bhutan. Because discourse
as well as sentential placement of nominal phrases is only briefly addressed, further research
is needed to clarify how these structures fit into the larger picture of a sentence as well as a
discourse.