ABSTRACT
This chapter aims at investigating the enactment of interpersonal meaning in Classical Tibetan, with special focus on the mood system, based on the theoretical and methodological dimensions of axial argumentation and cryptogrammar. Such dimensions, as fundamental principles in reasoning about language in SFL, deal with the complementarity between system and structure, foreground paradigmatic relations which are viewed as the essential principle of linguistic organization and explore systemic contrasts for the interpretation of underlying grammatical patterns. To illustrate these reasoning principles, this chapter, with the discourse semantic system of negotiation as a point of departure, provides a description of how various negotiation patterns are realized lexicogrammatically in standard literary Classical Tibetan, based upon a Buddhist folktale in Tibet. The description reveals that, in Classical Tibetan, mood choices are manifested mainly toward the final position of a clause, with the Predicator playing a central role, differentiating mood types by realization mainly through different verbal stems and co-occurrence with appropriate particles in the verbal group.
