Evidentiality in Tibetic Scott DeLancey 1 Introduction The unusual and unusually prominent grammatical expression of epistemic status and information source in Tibetic languages, especially Lhasa Tibetan,1 has played a prominent role in the study of evidentiality since that category was brought to the attention of the general linguistic public in the early 1980’s. Work by many scholars over the past two decades has produced a substantial body of more deeply-informed research on Lhasa and other Tibetic languages, only a small part of which I will be able to refer to here (see also DeLancey to appear). In this chapter I will mostly discuss Lhasa data, but concentrate on the ways that this system is typical of the pan-Tibetic phenomenon. The system will be presented inductively, in terms of grammatical categories in Tibetic languages, rather than deductively, in terms derived from theoretical claims or typological generalizations about a cross-linguistic category of evidentiality. 1 The terms “Standard” and “Lhasa” Tibetan are sometimes used interchangeably, but they are not exactly the same thing. The early publications on the topic (Goldstein and Nornang 1970, Jin 1979, Chang and Chang 1984, DeLancey 1985, 1986) were based on work with educated speakers from Lhasa, and those works and the data in this paper represent the Lhasa dialect, not “Standard Tibetan”. 2 The first known Tibetic language is Old Tibetan, the language of the Tibetan Empire, recorded in manuscripts from the 7th century CE. In scholarly as well as general use, ‘Tibetan’ is often applied to all descendants of this language, as well as to the written standard which developed from it. Since the modern descendants of OT are fully as divergent as, say, the Romance languages, it is preferable to distinguish them in our terminology; following Tournadre (2014), I will refer to the family as Tibetic, and to the individual languages as, e.g., Amdo rather than ‘Amdo Tibetan’. ‘Tibetan’ is appropriate in reference to varieties shared across the Tibetan cultural sphere, i.e. Classical Tibetan, Written Tibetan, Standard Tibetan. Evidentiality is not a feature of Classical Tibetan grammar. All the modern languages have some grammaticalized evidential constructions, and almost all (with the exception of Balti, see Bielmeier 2000) have a complicated system in which typical evidential categories such as inferential interact with the very unusual system of grammaticalized knowledge category which will be discussed below. But forms in these systems are often not cognate, and combined with the lack of evidence for evidentiality in older stages of the written language, this tells us that the modern systems represent a recent development, so that its prevalence across the family represents horizontal spread rather than common inheritance. 3 2 Evidentiality in Lhasa Tibetan Evidential phenomena in Lhasa (Central Tibetic) had already been noted in the literature before the concept and the associated term became a topic of wide interest in the 1980’s (Goldstein and Nornang 1970, Goldstein 1973, Jin 1979). From the mid 90’s (Tournadre 1996) we have had more and better primary descriptions, including a growing body of work on other Tibetic languages. 2.1 Previous work The notoriety of Tibetic in evidentiality studies is due to an unusual grammatical interaction with person. In almost all Tibetic languages there is a set of forms which typically occur only with 1st person statements and 2nd person questions; following current usage I will call these Egophoric verb forms (glossed EGO). In the following exchange, from a folktale, we see the Egophoric Imperfective verb ending -gi.yod used in a 2nd person question in (1a), and a 1st person statement in (1b):2 (1a) rang nam.rgyun lto.byad ga.re za-gi.yod=zer you ordinarily food what eat-IMPF.EGO=QUOT ‘‘What food do you usually eat?’ [he] said’ 2 Examples are presented in standard Tibetan orthography, transliterated according to the Wylie system. Hyphens represent relevant morpheme breaks. Periods represent morpheme breaks in compounds, and in the composite verb endings described in §2.3. 4 (b) tsa zas chu ‘thung byas-kyi.yod grass ate water drink do-IMPF.EGO ‘Eat grass, drink water is what I do.’ (Rabbit Eats the Baby) In quotative complements these forms signal coreference of the subjects of the complement and main clause, and this was the basis for Hale’s (1980) terms CONJUNCT and DISJUNCT for a similar phenomenon in Newar. In earlier work (DeLancey 1985, 1992) I adopted these labels, but, as this terminology grossly oversimplifies the fundamental nature of the Tibetic phenomenon (and is not apt even for Newar, see Hargreaves to appear), it was not universally popular with Tibetanists. Most scholars now use Tournadre’s (1996) term EGOPHORIC for the 1st-person-associated category which I had called ‘conjunct’. (For a more detailed history of the concept see Hargreaves 2005, Tournadre 2008). 2.2 The structure of information in Tibetic The verbal systems of modern Tibetic languages grammatically mark a distinction among three kinds of knowledge. The characteristic which has made Tibetic languages so celebrated in the world of evidential studies is a set of forms which mark a statement as representing certain kinds of personal knowledge. Following widespread current practice we may call these forms Egophoric, and the category which they express, personal knowledge. (I will use capitalized labels for specific grammatical constructions, and a distinct set of labels, uncapitalized, for the functional categories which they express). 5 Tibetic languages are often described in terms of a two-way distinction between Egophoric and other forms, but the latter can be further subdivided. A set of what I will call Factual forms express a category of assumed knowledge, i.e. assertions which are presented as not requiring any kind of evidential support. Finally, in perfective aspect, assertions which are presented as requiring evidential support are marked for Evidential status, i.e. as based on direct observation of the asserted fact or on inference from secondary evidence. This distinction has not been much discussed outside the Tibetic literature, and there is no standard or consensus terminology for it. Hein (2001: 35) speaks of ‘focus on speaker’s involvement’, ‘focus on speaker’s unspecified knowledge’, and ‘focus on speaker’s perception’; Zeisler (2004) of ‘personal self-evident’, ‘generic’, and ‘immediate perception’, DeLancey (2012) of personal, generic, and immediate forms, Hill (2013) of Personal, Factual, and Testimonial categories, Tournadre and LaPolla (2014) of Egophoric, Factual, and Sensory. The different labels emphasize different aspects of the same overall idea, distinguishing information which the speaker is the only possible source for, information which the speaker feels no need to provide any source for, and information which the speaker takes responsibility as the source for. Here I want to carefully distinguish between grammatical forms and the cognitive categories which they express. I will refer to the latter as personal, assumed, and contingent knowledge, and to the forms which express them in Tibetic languages as Egophoric, Factual, and Evidential (Direct vs. Inferential). 6 The distinction is encoded in the copular system, and many of the verbal endings which encode it are based on copulas and derive their evidential force from them. Consider the Lhasa examples: (2) nga-‘i nang bod-la yod 1sg-GEN home Tibet-LOC exist.PERSONAL ‘My home is in Tibet.’ (3) bod-la g.yag yog.red Tibet-LOC yak exist.FACTUAL ‘There are yaks in Tibet.’ (4) bod-la moṭa mang.po ‘dug Tibet-LOC auto many exist.DIRECT ‘There are lots of cars in Tibet.’ Examples like (2), with the Egophoric Existential copula yod, are often described as expressing personal knowledge, but are perhaps better thought of as self-representation. This statement, for example, does not necessarily describe any objectively verifiable fact, such as the existence of an ancestral homestead somewhere in Tibet; it simply expresses the speaker’s personal view of her place in the world. In (3), the use of the Factual form yog-red (sometimes written as yod-pa red) suggests that this statement is based on general knowledge, rather than personal experience or direct perception. The speaker 7 feels no need to justify the claim, and asks the addressee to simply take it as given. As we will see below (§4.1), statements in this form do not necessarily represent generic knowledge, but this is the appropriate form for statements which do. In (3), the Direct Evidential ‘dug indicates that the statement is based purely on direct perception. It might be said, for example, by a Tibetan who has lived abroad for many years, and returns for a visit to discover that nowadays one sees many cars, which were much less common in the old days. A speaker who had read or heard this information from others prior to visiting the country could instead use yog-red, indicating that this is a generally-known fact, but such a speaker could also use ‘dug as a way of expressing an acute awareness of how much things have changed. In either case the choice of ‘dug indicates that the statement expresses an impression based on immediate perception, rather than on any other basis. 2.3 The Lhasa verbal system The written language includes a small paradigm of opaque verb inflections which distinguish four stems, traditionally labeled Present, Past, Future and Imperative. In Classical Tibetan these constitute finite verb forms. The Classical system does not express evidential or egophoric categories. In the modern languages the verb usually requires further marking through innovative paradigms of suffixes and auxiliaries in order to function as finite, and this is where evidential categories are marked. Some Tibetic languages have finite forms which are simple nominalizations, but in all the largest part of the verb paradigm consists of endings of two kinds: erstwhile serial verbs and nominalized clause + copula constructions (DeLancey 2011).