Evidentials and their pivot in Tibetic and neighboring Himalayan languages
This paper focuses on a specific type of perspective-indexing constructions in Tibetic and neighboring languages,
namely a type of verbal marker that is consistently construed from the perspective of the speaker in statements, the addressee in
questions, and the source (= the original/reported speaker) in reported speech clauses. As these markers indicate how one obtained
the information profiled in a sentence and may thus be viewed as a type of evidential, they cannot at the same time establish
reference to any participant of the current speech act and thus by default reflect the perspective of the ‘informant’ of the
respective sentence type. If we define the encountered distinctions in relation to a cause-effect vector in the sense of DeLancey (1986), these languages all contain what we may call an ‘insider’ marker
indicating access to the entire vector including its causal origin and an ‘outsider’ marker indicating access only to its effect
end. Whereas the insider markers typically occur when the informant is the subject and the outsider markers when s/he is not, the
present paper discusses the different ways in which Tibetic and neighboring languages deviate from this basic pattern, and argues
that these differences reflect the fact that the markers in the latter languages were only secondarily evidentialized in reported
speech clauses, likely due to contact with Tibetic.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Tibetic evidentials
- 2.1Purik Tibetan existential copulas: Factual jot vs. direct evidential duk
- 2.2Prospective Purik V-et ‘will V’ vs. V-(t/n)uk ‘might V’
- 2.3A third existential in Ladakhi: Non-visual rak
- 2.4Equative yin vs. rak in Southern Mustang: ‘Personal engagement vs. neutral’
- 2.5Amdo: Direct evidential (past) -tʰæ vs. inferential -zəç
- 2.6Hybrid reported speech
- 3.Conjunct/disjunct markers in neighboring Himalayan languages
- 3.1The evidentialization of person markers in reported speech clauses
- 3.2Sunwar first vs. third person of the past tense
- 3.3Dolakha first/second vs. third person of the future tense
- 3.4Bunan first vs. third person of the present tense
- 3.5Kathmandu Newar conjunct vs. disjunct past forms
- 4.Concluding remarks
- Notes
- Abbreviations
-
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Cited by
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Spronck, Stef & Daniela Casartelli
2021.
In a Manner of Speaking: How Reported Speech May Have Shaped Grammar.
Frontiers in Communication 6
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