Lauren Gawne, Nathan W. Hill (Eds.) Evidential Systems of Tibetan Languages Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs Editor Volker Gast Editorial Board Walter Bisang Jan Terje Faarlund Hans Henrich Hock Natalia Levshina Heiko Narrog Matthias Schlesewsky Amir Zeldes Niina Ning Zhang Editor responsible for this volume Walter Bisang and Volker Gast Volume 302 Evidential Systems of Tibetan Languages Edited by Lauren Gawne Nathan W. Hill ISBN 978-3-11-046018-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-047374-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-047187-8 ISSN 1861-4302 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Compuscript Ltd., Shannon, Ireland Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Contents Nathan W. Hill and Lauren Gawne 1 The contribution of Tibetan languages to the study of evidentiality 1 Typology and history Shiho Ebihara 2 Evidentiality of the Tibetan verb snang 41 Lauren Gawne 3 Egophoric evidentiality in Bodish languages 61 Nicolas Tournadre 4 A typological sketch of evidential/epistemic categories in the Tibetic languages 95 Nathan W. Hill 5 Perfect experiential constructions: the inferential semantics of direct evidence 131 Guillaume Oisel 6 On the origin of the Lhasa Tibetan evidentials song and byung 161 Lhasa and Diasporic Tibetan Yasutoshi Yukawa 7 Lhasa Tibetan predicates 187 Nancy J. Caplow 8 Inference and deferred evidence in Tibetan 225 Other Tibetan languages Marius Zemp 9 Evidentiality in Purik Tibetan 261 Juha Yliniemi 10 Copulas in Denjongke or Sikkimese Bhutia 297 vi Contents Gwendolyn Hyslop and Karma Tshering 11 An overview of some epistemic categories in Dzongkha 351 Zoe Tribur 12 Observations on factors affecting the distributional properties of evidential markers in Amdo Tibetan 367 Hiroyuki Suzuki 13 The evidential system of Zhollam Tibetan 423 Katia Chirkova 14 Evidentials in Pingwu Baima 445 Index 461 Nathan W. Hill and Lauren Gawne 1 The contribution of Tibetan languages to the study of evidentiality In his Aṣṭādhyāyī the great Sanskrit grammarian Pāṇini cryptically notes the grammatical encoding of information source with the words parokṣe liṭ ‘one uses the perfect tense in reference to past action not linked to the present day and not witnessed’ (Hock 2012: 93–101); so began the study of evidentiality.1 Although Tibetan grammatical studies, like all domains of traditional Tibetan high culture, build upon Indian models, the Tibetan grammarians did not inherit an explicit awareness of evidentiality. Alexandra Aikhenvald’s 2004 monograph Evidentiality is the most thorough typological treatment of evidentiality to date, drawing on grammatical descriptions of over 500 languages (Aikhenvald 2004: xii). While Aikhenvald concedes that “evi- dentiality in Tibetan varieties was hardly mentioned” (Aikhenvald 2012: 467, Note 20) in her study, she does make reference to four Tibetan varieties, viz. Ladhaki, Amdo, Sherpa, and Lhasa. The World Atlas of Language Structures’ (WALS) survey of evidentiality2 draws on three of the same four Tibetan languages, omitting Lhasa, on the basis of the same secondary literature as Aikhenvald. There is scope both for increased documentation of Tibetan evidential systems and for typological work on evidentiality to make more ample use of the Tibetan data already available. Such work will deepen the understanding of specific Tibetan varieties and improve typo- logical theorizing on evidentiality (cf. Hill 2013a: 51–52; Tournadre, this volume). By making the results of research on Tibetan evidential systems more conveniently accessible, the work in the reader’s hands aids in filling these lacunae. The title of this work and this introduction refer to the varieties of Tibetan spoken today as Tibetan languages (we discuss this terminology in §5 below). We follow Tournadre in drawing together this “well-defined family of languages derived from Old Tibetan” (Tournadre 2014: 107). As all families do, these lan- guages demonstrate phonetically regular reflexes of historic forms, share a core vocabulary, and retain many elements of inherited grammar. As this volume 1 Boas (1911: 43) often mistakenly receives credit for the earliest discussion of grammatical mar- king of information souce (e.g. Aikhenvald 2004: 12–13, 2014: 4). 2 http://wals.info/feature/77A#2/16.6/148.7 Note: A list of abbreviations appears at the end of this chapter. Where possible, glosses in citations from other authors have been regularized to the Leipzig Glossing Rules. DOI 10.1515/9783110473742-001 2 Nathan W. Hill and Lauren Gawne demonstrates, despite their common features, these languages encode evidentia- lity in different ways, demonstrating the outcome of historical developments (see §4). Just as there is variation in how Tibetan languages have grammaticalised evi- dentiality, the speakers of these languages do not necessarily consider themselves as belonging to a single unified group. Tibetan language speakers reside in Tibet, other parts of China, India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Pakistan. Many Tibetan language speakers will not refer to themselves as Tibetan, but consider themselves to be a member of a specific cultural group, such as Sherpa, or Bhutia. In addition, not all Tibetan language speakers share the same Buddhist culture, e.g. the Purik and the Balti are predominantly Muslim (Zemp, this volume), and many Buddhist groups like the Yolmo have a synchronous indigenous tradition (Desjarlais 1992). This volume attempts to give some illustration of the diversity of Tibetan languages, with contributions on varieties from China, Nepal, India and Bhutan. Lhasa Tibetan is far and away the best described Tibetan variety. Con- sequently, to the extent typologists make reference to Tibetan at all, they rely primarily on Lhasa Tibetan and traditions of its analysis, in particular ‘conjunct-disjunct’ and ‘egophoric’. The three evidential categories of Lhasa Tibetan (called ‘personal’, ‘experiential’, and ‘factual’ in this introduction) serve as the point of departure in the exploration of other Tibetan varieties and in the study of the development of evidentials throughout Tibet’s long literary history. This introduction describes in turn, the history of the study of Lhasa Tibetan evi- dentiality (§1), the use of Lhasa Tibetan in typological discussions (§2), the study of other Tibetan varieties (§3), and research on the historical development of Tibetan evidentials (§4). The contributions to this volume correspondingly present research on Lhasa Tibetan, typology, other Tibetan varieties, and the historical emergence of Tibetan evidentiality and we refer to these contributions throug- hout this introduction. In §5 we discuss the conventions and nomenclature of the volume overall. Throughout this introduction we offer a standardized terminology (personal, factual, and experiential) as equivalences to the terminology of specific authors, in order to facilitate comparison among authors and Tibetan varieties. While we have given a definition of Tibetan, we have not given a defini- tion of evidentiality. Aikhenvald’s definition of evidentiality as “a grammatical expression of information source” (2015: 239) has a simplicity, and certainly has popularity. This rather narrow definition has perhaps led her to miss the nature of evidentiality in languages like Tibetan, which we discuss below. Tournadre and LaPolla (2014) also believe that Aikhenvald’s definition is too narrow. After a survey of some Tibetan varieties, and beyond, they give a definition of “the repre- sentation of source and access to information according to the speaker’s perspec- tive and strategy” (Tournadre and LaPolla 2014: 240). The inclusion of ‘access to information’ and ‘speaker’s perspective’ is intended to tease out some of the subtleties of personal evidentiality, which we discuss below. Attempting to find 1 The contribution of Tibetan languages to the study of evidentiality 3 one definition of evidentiality that applies to all languages may prove elusive. As can be seen in this volume, even closely related languages may use cognate forms in very different ways. Similarly, linguists from different theoretical back- grounds may approach the question of evidentiality in different ways. We have not constrained our authors by asking them to employ a particular definition of evidentiality in their analyses. As a related issue, attempting to articulate the relationship between evidenti- ality and other grammatical features, particularly those contextually-dependent features related to speaker stance, is unlikely to be a successful endeavor at the cross-linguistic level. Our authors expand on the interaction of evidentiality with other grammatical features as they see fit for a particular language. For many of our authors an understanding of modality, speaker perspective, and interro- gativity within a particular language are vital to an understanding of evidentia- lity. For example, for Hyslop and Tshering (this volume) evidentiality is entirely subsumed within the epistemic system. In order to keep this introduction to a containable size, we focus on the grammatical categories of evidentiality speci- fically, but we also acknowledge