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Direct evidentials, case, tense and aspect in Tibetan: evidence for a general theory of the semantics of evidential

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Abstract

Tibetan has three different morphemes expressing direct evidentiality. Only two of the three have been described in any detail, and the distinctions among these morphemes are described in quite different ways by different authors. We argue that careful study of these morphemes reveals that evidentials do not encode evidence type per se. Instead, they encode a relation between the situation being reported by the speaker and the situation within which evidence was acquired. This approach turns out not only to provide an accurate and systematic characterization of the different Tibetan direct evidentials, but also to predict a number of seemingly unrelated restrictions on their syntactic distribution. The distribution of these direct evidentials hence provides strong support for the proposal of Speas (2010) that evidentials of all categories encode relations among situations. Since Tibetan evidentials operate at the illocutionary level, our analysis further suggests that illocutionary force is best modeled not as a feature of situations per se, but rather as a relation between relevant situations.

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Notes

  1. We use the standard Wylie (1959) transliteration system for the Tibetan examples. Capitalization in some systems of Tibetan transcription represents aspects of Tibetan script that are otherwise missing from the transcription. We use capital letters only to indicate the root letter of a proper name.

  2. We use the following abbreviations in the glosses: abl = ablative case, acc = accusative case, agt/inst = agentive/instrumental case, dir = direct evidential, hon = honorific, impf = imperfective aspect, ind = indirect evidential, loc = locative case, neg = negative, neut = neutral evidential, obl = oblique case, perf = perfective aspect, pres = present tense, q = question, term = terminative. Ego evidentials are used “when the origo has intimate and immediate knowledge of a situation.” (Garrett 2001:5) Ego evidence involves personal, usually internal, experience, while direct evidence involves witnessing of a distinct, usually external, situation.

  3. Some authors, e.g., Agha (1993), analyze instrumental/agentive as ergative.

  4. Although Faller analyzes Quechua evidentials as illocutionary operators, they are of different semantic types in the sense that the ways in which the different evidentials change sincerity conditions are not related or part of a constrained system. The direct specifies that the assertion is based on “best possible grounds,” the indirect introduces a modal operator and specifies that the assertion is based on reasoning, and the hearsay introduces an additional ASSERT predicate and distinct speaker.

  5. Modals in Tibetan also do not license a subject.

  6. Subjects may be null in Tibetan, so sentences with attitude predicates may resemble sentences with evidentials. However, impersonal subjects are in general null pronouns in Tibetan, so there is no reason to treat attitude predicates as markers of evidentiality, which cannot occur with overt Subjects.

  7. Note that this test doesn’t necessarily rule out evidential +p where the speaker does not know whether p is true or false. A reviewer points out that yod gi red is felicitous if the speaker has some uncertainty. The test simply does not distinguish modals from illocutionary operators in such cases.

  8. According to Murray, hearsay evidentials are deniable in Cheyenne but this is at least unusual, and it may be that these are in fact disguised attitude ascriptions with null subjects. This requires further study.

  9. For greater detail regarding this test, see de Villiers et al. (2009).

  10. In Tibetan culture (and Buddhist culture in general) there are six senses: vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and the introspective sense that yields knowledge of one’s own inner states, such as thoughts, emotions, and sensations. See, for example, Bodhi (2000).

  11. See also Delancey (1986, 1990), who suggests that different evidentials indicate that the speaker has knowledge of different links of the causal chain of an event.

  12. Garrett actually discusses occurrences of ‘dug both with and without the imperfective -gi.

  13. The interaction of evidentiality and tense seems to be different in Tibetan than in Sherpa as described by Woodbury (1986). In Sherpa, the nonpast direct evidential (-nok) expresses evidence acquired in the present, so when this morpheme is used with past tense, it takes on a meaning of inference based on some presently relevant result.

  14. It is clear in Garrett and Bateman’s discussion that the fact that consultants saw videos rather than real-life situations was not relevant to the choice of evidential.

  15. The auxiliary bsdad as in (20a) is obligatory with shag in the present tense. In Sect. 5.2.1 we will show that the reason for this does not pertain directly to result states.

  16. Progressive aspect in English might impose a non-quanitzed interpretation on quantized predicate, but imperfective does not.

  17. Strictly speaking the relation is probably part/whole rather than inclusion in the set-theoretic sense, since the parts of an eventuality cannot necessarily be treated as a set. We will use the terms “includes” or “contains” interchangeably with “is part of,” in order to highlight the parallels between evidentials and tense/aspect markers.

  18. An account of the distinction between direct and indirect evidentials based on relations between situations can be found in McKenzie (2007).

  19. See Sect. 7 below and Speas (2010) for discussion of the accessibility relation encoded by indirect evidentials.

  20. In a more complete representation, the aspect will of course have a lower scope than the level of the proposition, but our shorthand abstracts away from this. Crucially, evidentials have scope over aspect.

  21. De Haan observes that direct evidence involves events that are “in the same deictic sphere” as the speaker. Garrett (2001) proposes that direct evidentials project a situation that is locatable and known by the speaker. Nikolaeva (1999) proposes that tenses in Ostyak project situation variables, and that direct evidential meanings arise from overlap between situations. Faller (2002, 2004) and Chung (2005) distinguish direct from indirect evidentials in terms of whether the “speaker’s perceptual trace” coincides with the location of the reported event at Reference (Topic) time.

  22. Some theories of non-quantized eventualities might treat the timespan of the representative portion as the relevant timespan, in which case the timespan of the witnessing situation would in fact include the timespan of the witnessed situation, but the point is that evidentials do not introduce any information about times.

  23. For the sake of concreteness, let us assume Kratzer’s (2007) description of knowledge ascriptions: S knows p if and only if

    1. (i)

      There is a fact f that exemplifies p,

    2. (ii)

      S believes p de re of f, and

    3. (iii)

      S can rule out relevant possible alternatives of f that do not exemplify p. (Kratzer 2007:15)

    (iii) corresponds to the informal “has adequate evidence.”

  24. It may be that we cannot leave it at that, and must specify that evidentials contribute information about the “adequate evidence.” We might, for example, follow Davis et al. (2007) proposal that evidentials update the “quality threshold.” Our claim is that this update is not based on primitives such as “direct evidence,” “indirect evidence,” “hearsay”, etc.

  25. Or more accurately, the pragmatics of statements about the present.

  26. There isn’t currently a consensus among semanticists on the exact role of quantization, imperfectivity, and telicity in the interpretation of present tense, so our explanation here is necessarily speculative.

  27. This example illustrates that, as Landman (1992) has pointed out, such interpretations are intensional, so for example seeing mother get out ingredients that the speaker can’t identify as momo ingredients won’t license the use of a witness evidential.

  28. Interesting questions arise about the extent to which one can determine independent of context whether one situation is part of another. In this particular case, it seems reasonable to suppose that since food is an inherent part of any eating situation, pieces of the food (crumbs) can be considered part of the eating situation. Our analysis predicts that there should be some flexibility in what can be treated as part of a situation within a given context. We do not think that this undermines our proposal, although it does raise the question of the relative contributions of lexical semantics and context in determining the composition of the relevant situations.

  29. We think that the same effect holds with focused objects, but we haven’t tested a wide enough range of predicate types to be sure.

  30. See Garrett (2001: Chap. 7) for an interesting discussion of the discinctions between direct and ego evidentials in conditionals.

  31. Garrett suggests that color predicates with ‘dug are rare, but we do not think this is true.

  32. It is beyond the scope of this paper to determine how the semantics of genericity interacts with evidentials. A generic situation is represented by its instances. The IS for such sentences would be observation of a set of instances. This IS includes a representative instance.

  33. And the spatiotemporal argument is what distinguishes the stage-level and individual-level readings, so we cannot say that coercion introduces the argument without a stage-level interpretation.

  34. For example, “The medication seems to be working” would generally be true of some situation involving the individual taking the medication.

  35. She uses the term “Reference Situation” (RS).

  36. Speas further suggests that accessibility is equivalent in situational terms to precedence in temporal relations, as is reflected by our use of expressions like “follows from” or “leads to” in describing inferences.

  37. In English it’s possible to explicitly ignore information in the common ground. For example, in Context 2 a speaker could say something like, “Well, I infer that mother is cooking, despite appearances.” Evidentials differ from verbs in that an assertion of p+evidential is always an assertion of p.

  38. Speas proposes that IS includes DS. It may be more accurate to say that the Discourse Situation includes the IS, although this might rule out knowledge based on experiences of the speaker that are temporally or locationally removed from the current discourse.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to many people for helpful comments, in particular Edward Garrett, Leah Bateman, Rose Marie Déchaine, Alda Mari, Lisa Matthewson, Craige Roberts, Tom Roeper, Johan Rooryck, Angelika Kratzer, Bettina Zeisler, audiences at Ohio State University and the University of Calgary, and participants in several seminars at UMass. Portions of this research were funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, BCS#0527509.

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  1. Smith College, Northampton, MA, USA

    Kalsang

  2. Department of Philosophy, Smith College, Northampton, MA, USA

    Jay Garfield

  3. Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

    Margaret Speas

  4. Department of Psychology, Smith College, Northampton, MA, USA

    Jill de Villiers

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  1. Kalsang
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Correspondence to Margaret Speas.

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Kalsang, Garfield, J., Speas, M. et al. Direct evidentials, case, tense and aspect in Tibetan: evidence for a general theory of the semantics of evidential. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 31, 517–561 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-013-9193-9

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