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Article published In:
The Linguistic Expression of Mirativity
Edited by Agnès Celle and Anastasios Tsangalidis
[Review of Cognitive Linguistics 15:2] 2017
► pp. 515–539

Don’t believe in a paradigm that you haven’t manipulated yourself!

Evidentiality, speaker attitude, and admirativity in Ladakhi

| University of Tübingen

A speaker may conceptualise a situation from three different modal ‘perspectives’: epistemic, evidential, and attitudinal. Languages differ in which of these concepts they perspectivise and how a grammaticalised concept may be extended to the other two. ‘Lesser-known’ languages tend to be misrepresented in the typological literature. E.g., the Modern Tibetic languages, including the Ladakhi dialects, are said to have grammaticalised the concept of evidentiality. However, their ‘evidential’ systems differ from the cross-linguistically acknowledged evidential systems, in that speaker attitude is co-grammaticalised and knowledge based on perception shares properties with knowledge based on inferences. DeLancey therefore claimed that these systems also encode mirativity. The starting point for the development of these typologically rather uncommon ‘evidential’ systems was a lexical marker for non-commitment (or admirativity): the auxiliary ḥdug.

Keywords: admirative, evidentiality, speaker attitude, Ladakhi, Tibetan, language history
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Hill vs. DeLancey: Is mirativity a (universally valid) grammatical category?
  • 3.Chinese whispers: Conceptual fuzziness and the ‘lesser known’ languages
  • 4.Definitions
  • 5.The auxiliary systems of modern Tibetic languages, in particular Ladakhi
    • 5.1Mirative and not-so-mirative usages of the auxiliary ḥdug in Ladakhi
    • 5.2Other ways of expressing surprise and/or emotional involvement in Tibetic languages
      • 5.2.1Iconic marking
      • 5.2.2Exclamatives and explicit references to surprises
      • 5.2.3And surprise: there is a marker for surprise or counterexpectation
    • 5.3The historical dimension: ḥdug as a marker of non-commitment
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.15.2.09zei
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Brosig, Benjamin
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Celle, Agnès
2018. Chapter 10. Questions as indirect speech acts in surprise contexts. In Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality [Studies in Language Companion Series, 197], ► pp. 213 ff. DOI logo
Depraz, Natalie & Agnès Celle
2019. Introduction. In Surprise at the Intersection of Phenomenology and Linguistics [Consciousness & Emotion Book Series, 11], ► pp. 2 ff. DOI logo
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2024. Evidentiality as a grammaticalization passenger. Studies in Language DOI logo
San Roque, Lila
2019. Evidentiality. Annual Review of Anthropology 48:1 ► pp. 353 ff. DOI logo
Zeisler, Bettina
2017. The emergence of the Ladakhi inferential and experiential markers from a marker for admirativity (non-commitment): the case ofḥdugandsnaŋ. Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 4:2 ► pp. 259 ff. DOI logo
Zeisler, Bettina
2018. Chapter 9. Evidence for the development of ‘evidentiality’ as a grammatical category in the Tibetic languages. In Evidence for Evidentiality [Human Cognitive Processing, 61], ► pp. 227 ff. DOI logo

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