Cover not available
Part of
Egophoricity
Edited by Simeon Floyd, Elisabeth Norcliffe and Lila San Roque
[Typological Studies in Language 118] 2018
► pp. 109–137

Chapter 3
Mirativity and egophoricity in Kurtöp

| The University of Sydney

The terms ‘mirative’ and ‘egophoric’ have often been employed to describe various epistemic contrasts which, on the surface, appear to be quite similar. Kurtöp, a Tibeto-Burman language of Northeastern Bhutan, contrasts both mirativity and egophoricity, providing evidence that they are two separate categories. Mirativity in Kurtöp is a pervasive feature of the grammar; it occurs in imperfective and perfective aspect, in addition to being encoded in affirmative and negative forms of existential and equational copulas. In statements, the mirative is used to encode that knowledge was new or unexpected to the speaker while non-mirative forms encode old knowledge. In questions, only non-mirative forms are used. In contrast to mirative marking, egophoricity is marked in perfective aspect only. An egophoric form encodes that the speaker has intimate knowledge of an event or intention of an event; a non-egophoric form does not encode this personal knowledge. Unusually, egophoric marking in Kurtöp includes a distinction as to whether knowledge is exclusive to the speaker, or is thought to be shared. Mirative and egophoric forms have particular tendencies to co-occur with certain subjects, especially in elicitation. However, when we look within natural discourse, these categories are complex, with subtler meanings than basic elicitation would suggest.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Kurtöp
    • 2.1Clauses with copulas
    • 2.2Clauses without copulas
    • 2.3Verbal enclitics
  • 3.Mirativity and egophoricity
  • 4.Mirativity in Kurtöp
    • 4.1Mirativity as a paradigm
    • 4.2Mirativity in use
  • 5.Egophoricity in Kurtöp
    • 5.1 -shang
    • 5.2 -pala
  • 6.Summary
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Published online: 25 April 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.118.03hys
References
Aris, Michael
1979 Bhutan, the Early History of a Himalayan Kingdom. Warminster: Aris & Phillips.Google Scholar
Aronson, Howard
1967 The grammatical categories of the indicative in the contemporary Bulgarian literary language. In To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, 11 October 1966, 82–98. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Bashir, Elena
2010 Traces of mirativity in Shina. Himalayan Linguistics 9(2): 1–55.Google Scholar
Bosch, Andre
2016 Language contact in Upper Mangdep: A comparative grammar of verbal constructions. Sydney: University of Sydney Honours thesis.Google Scholar
Curnow, Timothy Jowan
2000 Why “first/non-first person” is not grammaticalized mirativity. In Proceedings of ALS2k, the 2000 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, Keith Allan & John Henderson (eds). [URL]
DeLancey, Scott
1990 Ergativity and the cognitive model of event structure in Lhasa Tibetan. Cognitive Linguistics 1(3): 289–321. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1992 The historical status of the conjunct/disjunct pattern in Tibeto-Burman. Acta Linguistica Hafniensa 25: 39–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1997 Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information. Linguistic Typology 1: 33–52. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2001 The mirative and evidentiality. Journal of Pragmatics 33: 369–382. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 Kurtöp and Tibetan. In Chomolangma, Demawend und Kasbek: Festschrift für Roland Bielmeier zu seinem 65. Geburtstag, Brigitte Huber, Marianne Volkart, Paul Widmer & Peter Schwieger (eds), 29–38. Bonn: VGH Wissenschaftsverlag.Google Scholar
2012 Still mirative after all these years. Linguistic Typology 16: 529–564.Google Scholar
Dickinson, Connie
2000 Mirativity in Tsafiki. Studies in Language 24(2): 379–421. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Driem, George
1998 Dzongkha [Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region 1]. Leiden: Research School CNWS.Google Scholar
Friedman, Victor
1977 The Grammatical Categories of the Mecedonian Indicative. Columbus OH: Slavica.Google Scholar
1986 Evidentiality in the Balkans: Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Albanian. In Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology [Advances in Discourse Processes 20], Wallace L. Chafe & Johanna Nichols (eds), 168–187. Norwood NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Gawne, Lauren & Hill, Nathan
(eds) 2017 Evidential Systems in Tibetic Languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Genetti, Carol
2009 An introduction to Dzala, an East Bodish language of Bhutan. Presented at the 15th Himalayan Languages Symposium, August 1, Eugene OR.Google Scholar
Grunow-Harsta, Karen
2007 Evidentiality and mirativity in Magar. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 30(2): 151–194.Google Scholar
Hale, Austin
1980 Person markers: Finite conjunct and disjunct verb forms in Newari. In Papers in Southeast Asian Linguistics 7 [Pacific Linguistics Series A, 53], Ronald L. Trail (ed.), 95–106. Canberra: Australian National University.Google Scholar
Hill, Nathan
2012 ‘Mirativity’ does not exist: ‘Lhasa’ ḥdug and other suspects. Linguistic Typology 16: 289–433. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hyslop, Gwendolyn
2008 Kurtöp and the classification of the languages of Bhutan. In Proceedings from the 44th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 141–152. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
2009 Kurtöp tone: A tonogenetic case study. Lingua 119: 827–845. DOI logo.Google Scholar
2011 Mirativity in Kurtöp. Journal of South Asian Linguistics 4(1): 43–60.Google Scholar
2017 A Grammar of Kurtöp. Leiden, Brill.Google Scholar
Hyslop, Gwendolyn & Tshering, Karma
2017. An overview of some epistemic categories in Dzongkha. In Evidential Systems of Tibetan Languages, Lauren Gawne & Nathan W. Hill eds 331 365 Berlin De Gruyter Mouton
Michailovsky, Boyd & Mazaudon, Martine
1994 Preliminary notes on languages of the Bumthang groups. In Tibetan Studies: Proceedings of the 6th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Vol. 2, 545–557. Fagernes: The Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture.Google Scholar
Post, Mark W.
2013 Person-sensitive TAME marking in Galo: Historical origins and functional motivation. In Functional-Historical Approaches to Explanation: In Honor of Scott DeLancey [Typological Studies in Language 103], Tim Thornes, Erik Andvik, Gwendolyn Hyslop & Joana Jansen (eds), 107–130. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shafer, Robert
1954 The linguistic position of Dwags. Oriens, Zeitschrift Der Internationalen Gesellschraft Für Orientforschung 7: 348–356.Google Scholar
Sun, Jackson T.-S.
1993 Evidentials in Amdo Tibetan. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academica Sinica 63(4): 945–1001.Google Scholar
Tournadre, Nicolas
2008 Against the concept of ‘Conjunct’/’Disjunct’ in Tibetan. In Chomolangma, Demawend und Kasbek: Festschrift für Roland Bielmeier zu seinem 65. Geburtstag, Brigitte Huber, Marianne Volkart, Paul Widmer & Peter Schwieger (eds), 281–308. Bonn: VGH Wissenschaftsverlag.Google Scholar
Tournadre, Nicolas & LaPolla, Randy J.
2014 Towards a new approach to evidentiality: Issues and directions for research. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 37(2): 240–63. DOI logo.Google Scholar
Watters, David
2002 A Grammar of Kham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 5 other publications

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.
2023. Speaking about knowledge. Studies in Language DOI logo
Grollmann, Selin
2020. Diachronic aspects of Bjokapakha epistemic verbal morphology. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 43:1 ► pp. 87 ff. DOI logo
Grzech, Karolina, Eva Schultze-Berndt & Henrik Bergqvist
2020. Knowing in interaction: An introduction. Folia Linguistica 54:2 ► pp. 281 ff. DOI logo
Hyslop, Gwendolyn
2020. Grammaticalized sources of Kurtöp verbal morphology. Studies in Language 44:1 ► pp. 132 ff. DOI logo
San Roque, Lila
2019. Evidentiality. Annual Review of Anthropology 48:1 ► pp. 353 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.