The analysis of the literary Tibetan verb system is an object of typological interest for several reasons. Firstly, it allows us to look at the evolution of the verb system notably auxiliary verb constructions and clause linking during a period of more than a thousand years. Classical Tibetan has the advantage of having preserved almost the same orthography during this very long period of time. I decided to focus on the fifteenth century by selecting a well-known book as a main corpus: the Life of Milarepa. I then compared the verb system of this period with contemporary literary Tibetan. The main reason for this study is to better understand the emergence of an auxiliary verb system in middle Tibetan which marks evidentiality, that is to say the grammaticalization of the epistemological source and the access to information. Literary Tibetan is the only language in Asia with an ancient history which has developed a complex evidential verb system. Apart from the analysis of grammatical semantics, the second reason for this study is my interest in the syntax of auxiliary verb constructions and of clause linking in middle Tibetan and their evolution in contemporary Tibe! tan. My data on literary Tibetan and my synchronic and diachronic analysis may make a significant contribution to the typological studies of evidentiality and epistemic modality as well as of the syntax of auxiliary verb constructions and clause linking.
