This publication is supported by La Trobe University Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area Volume 30.2 — October 2007 http://www.latrobe.edu.au THE MIRATIVE AND ITS INTERPLAY WITH EVIDENTIALITY IN THE TIBETAN DIALECT OF TABO (SPITI) Veronika Hein University of Berne
[email protected] This article presents different mirative constructions found in Tabo Tibetan. It mainly focuses on two morphemes which can express mirativity. Their usage and possible connotations are described and they are also discussed in their relationship to the complex evidential system of this dialect. Keywords: Mirative, Tabo Tibetan, mirative morphemes, connotations, evidential system. 1. INTRODUCTION The Tibetan dialect spoken at Tabo1 in the lower Spiti Valley in Himachal Pradesh, India (see map), shows a fully developed mirative with its specific set of mirative morphemes. This seems to be a new phenomenon in the Tibetan dialects described so far, as the miratives found in most descriptions of Tibetan appear to be a semantic extension of the system of evidentiality. In this paper I intend to trace a possible development from one of those well-known mirative constructions into the mirative morpheme found in Tabo Tibetan. I will go on to show that this basic mirative morpheme only occurs with some limited groups of verbs (all non-control verbs and some verbs of motion) and that a kind of parallel morpheme has been found to work in the remaining groups 1 The Tabo dialect of Tibetan will be referred to as Tabo Tibetan in this paper. The examples have all been collected from my main informant Sonam Tsering of Tabo Village.