“Mirativity” does not exist: ḥdug in “Lhasa” Tibetan and other suspects

Largely through the efforts of Scott DeLancey the grammatical category “mirative” has gained currency in linguistics. DeLancey bases his elaboration of this category on a misunderstanding of the semantics of h. dug in “Lhasa” Tibetan. Rather than showing “surprising information”, linguists working on Tibetan have long described ḥdug as a sensory evidential. Much of the evidence DeLancey and Aikhenvald present for mirativity in other languages is also susceptible to explanation in terms of sensory evidence or appears close to Lazard’s “mediative” (1999) or Johanson’s “indirective” (2000). Until an independent grammatical category for “new information” is described in a way which precludes analysis in terms of sensory evidence or other well established evidential categories, mirativity should be excluded from the descriptive arsenal of linguistic analysis

Psych-predicates: 1st Person and Evidentiality

AbstractThis paper characterizes psych-predicates in Korean and possibly in Japanese, as opposed to English. We focus on the the status of the Experiencer (or „judge‟ in the relativists‟ term) in relation to other arguments (and higher attitude verbs) and examine the first-person subjectivity constraint, attempting to explain why a third-person subject is infelicitous with a psych- predicate in PRESENT in Korean and Japnese as opposed to English. An evidence acquisition event before speech time is claimed to be accommodated in English. Interaction between psych-predicates and direct evidential marker –te in Korean is also examined. Relevant cause and effect relations and consequent coerced event functions are also postulated for coherent interpretation

The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality

This volume offers a thorough, systematic, and crosslinguistic account of evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. In some languages, the speaker always has to specify this source - for example whether they saw the event, heard it, inferred it based on visual evidence or common sense, or was told about it by someone else. While not all languages have obligatory marking of this type, every language has ways of referring to information source and associated epistemological meanings. The continuum of epistemological expressions covers a range of devices from the lexical means in familiar European languages and in many languages of Aboriginal Australia to the highly grammaticalized systems in Amazonia or North America. In this handbook, experts from a variety of fields explore topics such as the relationship between evidentials and epistemic modality, contact-induced changes in evidential systems, the acquisition of evidentials, and formal semantic theories of evidentiality. The book also contains detailed case studies of evidentiality in language families across the world, including Algonquian, Korean, Nakh-Dagestanian, Nambikwara, Turkic, Uralic, and Uto-Aztecan

Grammaticalization and Pragmatic Functions of –KES KATH–.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017

Evidentiality, Questions and the Reflection Principle in Tibetan: What do Children Learn when they Learn About Evidentiality?

Evidentials fall in the borderland between traditional semantics and pragmatics. A situation semantics for evidentials helps to explain their puzzling developmental pathway in children. Drawing on our work in Tibetan, we argue that there is no necessity for a child to master Theory of Mind, that is, awareness of others\u27 mental states, in order to make or to understand assertions that carry evidential force. The meaning of evidentials does not make reference to states of knowledge of persons, but rather encodes relations between discourse, evidence and evaluation situations. On the other hand, when a Tibetan speaker asks a question, the form of the evidential used in the question must anticipate the kind of knowledge the interlocutor can access in reply. Full mastery of questions in Tibetan-speaking children does require attention to and representation of others\u27 states of knowledge and belief

Romanian Evidentials

This paper contains an investigation of some aspects of Romanian modality constructed with auxiliaries. These forms can be combined either with the infinitive, or with overt (imperfective /perfective) aspectual morphology. In the latter case, they might give rise to interpretations which have been classified in Romanian grammars as presumptive (broadly described as referring to probability, uncertainty, guess). In these contexts, all the auxiliaries are traditionally taken to be synonymous. This paper demonstrates that this conclusion cannot hold; a more in-depth examination shows instead that each modal auxiliary encodes a specific type of indirect source of information the proposition is based upon. In other words, Romanian modal auxiliaries have an individual indirect evidential component. The application of canonical tests used in the literature supports a modal analysis of Romanian evidentials, as opposed to an alternative illocutionary operator account. Another characteristic of modal auxiliaries that is touched upon is the nature of the ambiguity relations with their perfective forms. It is assumed, following recent accounts by Condoravdi (2001), Ippolito (2002, et subseq.), Copley (2002), among others, that the ways in which temporal/aspectual heads interact with modal projections are responsible for various interpretations. For example, when temporal/aspectual heads are above the modal, counterfactual readings arise. When they are below the modal, only evidential interpretations are possible

Modal Markers in Japanese: A Study of Learners’ Use before and after Study Abroad

Japanese discourse requires speakers to index, in a relatively explicit manner, their stance toward the propositional information as well as the hearer. This is done, among other things, by means of a grammaticalized set of modal markers. Although previous research suggests that the use of modal expressions by second language learners differs from that of native users, little is known about “typical” native or non-native behavior. This study aims (a) to delineate native and non-native usage by a quantitative examination of a broad range of Japanese modal categories, and qualitative analyses of a subset of potentially problematic categories among them, and (b) to identify possible developmental trajectories, by means of a longitudinal observation of learners’ verbal production before and after study abroad in Japan. We find that modal categories realized by non- transparent or non-salient markers (e.g., explanatory modality no da, or utterance modality sentence-final particles) pose particular challenges in spite of their relatively high availability in the input, and we discuss this finding in terms of processing constraints that arguably affect learners’ acquisition of the grammaticalized modal markers