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The mirative and evidentiality
jnx, nl101 ELSEVIER
Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 369-382
I
www.elsevier.nl/locate/pragma
The mirative and evidentiality Scott D e L a n c e y *
Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA Abstract
Evidentiality refers to the grammatical marking of the source of evidence for a proposition; mirativity refers to the marking of a proposition as representing information which is new to the speaker. Mirativity has sometimes been thought of as part of the larger category of evidentiality. Based on evidence from Tibetan, Hare, and other languages, it is argued here that mirativity must be recognized as a distinct semantic and grammatical category. The existence in many languages of a form which combines mirative and inferential readings can be explained in terms of the interaction of mirativity and aspect: The combination of mirative marking and perfective aspect will naturally tend to be interpreted as inferential, since an event in the past will ordinarily be new information to the speaker only if his or her knowledge of it derives from secondary evidence rather than from direct perception. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Evidentiality; Mirative; Mirativity; Modality; Tibetan; Athabaskan
1. I n t r o d u c t i o n
Recent work has established the existence in a broad range of languages of an evidential-like category which is used to mark both hearsay or inference and certain kinds of first-hand knowledge (DeLancey, 1997). The mirative or admirative has a respectable history of recognition in Balkan linguistics, and has occasionally been noted elsewhere (see Jacobsen, 1964, 1986, on the North American language Washo). Only recently, however, has it begun to be recognized as a widespread phenomenon rather than a local peculiarity, and considerable new documentation of mirative systems is appearing (Leinonen, forthcoming; Slater, 1996; Dickinson, forthcoming; Watters, 1998a,b). The term 'mirativity' refers to the linguistic marking
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of an utterance as conveying information which is new or unexpected to the speaker. The nature of the category will become clearer as we discuss examples later. Mirative forms often intersect both semantically and paradigmatically with evidential systems. Where mirative constructions have been recognized in the past, they have often been considered simply an odd appendage to evidentiality (see, for example, Guentch6va, 1996a: 13). While acknowledging the importance of the mirative semantic component in various evidential systems, Lazard (1999, this volume) points out that throughout the Balkan-West Asian evidentiality belt, mirativity and evidentiality are entwined in a single system. He argues against recognizing mirativity as a grammatical phenomenon distinct from evidentiality. The attested connection between these categories is important, and we need to understand it better. At the same time, there is a clear logical distinction between mirativity and evidentiality, and in some languages expressions of mirativity can be found which have no grammatical connection to any evidential system. My primary purpose in this paper is to discuss reasons for treating mirativity as an independent phenomenon distinct from evidentiality, though I do this without denying that there is good evidence for a close relationship between the two categories.
2. The question of categories There has been much discussion in the literature of the issue of distinguishing semantic and grammatical categories like evidentiality, modality, and mirativity. Mirative forms, as I have noted, are often treated by linguists as exponents of the general category of evidentiality. Clearly, for example, the languages discussed by Lazard (this volume) provide good linguistic evidence that, as he puts it, inference, hearsay, and 'constatation inattendue', i.e., direct perception of one's own unintended and unexpected actions, constitute some kind of unified category. It is often argued that the category of evidentiality has intimate links with that of modality. Linguistic evidence for this claim is readily available (see Plungian, this volume). Consider, for instance, the clearly evidential reading of certain uses of English must, as when we say of someone who has failed to show up when expected: (1) He must have gotten lost. Nevertheless, we can have modal systems which do not express evidentiality, and evidential systems which are in no legitimate sense modal. I will also present evidence that we can find expressions of mirativity which are not evidential in the sense that the systems which Lazard discusses clearly are. There is an important question here, more fundamental than the simple problem of categorization of linguistic structures. Whatever their linguistic expression, categories like evidentiality are ultimately semantic in definition. A fundamental tenet of functionalist linguistics is that languages express in their grammars those semantic and pragmatic categories for which their speakers have a frequent and regular need. The obvious implication is that categories which are widespread in the world's languages
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express semantic and pragmatic functions which are universal in human cognition and communication. Put in phenomenological terms, the fundamental communicative function of language is to provide the speaker with tools with which to guide a hearer in constructing an experiential representation. The categories which we consistently find in language are means of representing universal aspects of human experience. Much research in semantics and pragmatics has assumed an objectivist view of truth and human knowledge stemming from a belief that the structure of language must reflect some version of formal logic. It is abundantly clear, however, that this deductive approach is inadequate, and that neither human language nor natural human cognition can be completely described in these terms. Research into the nature and interrelations of the categories expressed in human language is, in fact, inductive empirical research into the structure of human thought. And, thus, the question whether evidentiality is a form of modality or a distinct category, or whether mirativity is a subcategory of evidentiality, are of substantial importance.
3. Mirativity and evidentiality in Lhasa Tibetan I first became aware of the phenomenon of mirativity when I was trying to untangle the marking of evidentiality and volition in the Lhasa Tibetan verb paradigm. If we look only at clauses in perfective aspect with third person arguments, Lhasa shows what looks like a fairly typical evidential system, distinguishing knowledge obtained through direct perception of the event, through direct perception of a state resulting from the event, and indirectly (DeLancey, 1985, 1986, 1990a, 1992a; for related discussion see also Jin, 1979; Woodbury, 1986; Sun, 1993; Agha, 1993; Tournadre, 1996): (2) blo=bzang-gis thang=kha bkal-song P.N.-ERG thangka hang-PERF/DIRECT 'Lobsang hung up a thangka (religious painting).' (direct perception) (3) blo=bzang-gis thang=kha bkal-bzhag -PERF/INFERENTIAL 'idem.' (inference from direct knowledge of a subsequent state, e.g., the speaker sees firsthand that the thangka has been hung) (4) blo=bzang-gis thang=kha bkal-pa red -PERF/INDIRECT 'idem.' (hearsay, inference, or general knowledge) With first person subject (or questions with second person subject, see below), however, there is an additional distinction which reflects volitionality rather than evidentiality per se: (5) a. nga-s kho dbril-pa yin I-ERG he knock.down-PERF/CONJUNCT 'I knocked him down.' (intentionally)
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b. nga-s kho dbril-song -PERF/DIRECT 'I knocked him down.' (unintentionally) Note that the form which with first person subject indicates non-volitionality is the same as that which with third person indicates direct knowledge on the part of the speaker. 3.1. The 'conjunct/disjunct' pattern
Several alternations in the Tibetan verbal system are sensitive to the distinction between statements with a first person argument (almost always subject, except for one construction which we will not deal with here; see DeLancey, 1984), questions with a second person, and all other sentences. This is the most elaborate example that I know of the 'conjunct/disjunct' (Hale, 1980) or '6gophorique' (Tournadre, 1996) pattern, which has been noted in a few other Tibeto-Burman languages (DeLancey, 1992a) and, as far as I know, in only two non-Tibeto-Burman languages (see Dickinson, forthcoming; Slater, 1996). Roughly speaking, conjunct forms occur with first person subjects in statements and second person subjects in questions which refer to an intentional act. I have argued that this distinction can be interpreted as part of the evidential system, where the conjunct forms represent the speaker's direct perception of the act of volition which leads to an action, and the disjunct form represents its absence (DeLancey, 1985, 1986, 1990a; see also Hargreaves, 1991). Since only the perpetrator of an act can possibly have direct knowledge of the act of volition which led to it, this distinction can be made only in statements with first person actor and in questions with second person actor. This distinction (but not the purely evidential one) also occurs in the imperfect and future; the forms are laid out in Table 1. Table 1 The Lhasa tense/aspect/evidentialitysystem No direct knowledge
Perfective Imperfective Future
-pa red =gi yod-pa red =gi red
Direct knowledgeof Volition (conjunct)
Event (disjunct)
Resultant state
-pa yin =gi yod =gi yin
-song =gi ('dug)
-zhag
While, as an evidential system, the Lhasa verbal paradigm has some very atypical features, they can reasonably be integrated into an interpretation of the system as an evidential system.
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3.2. Conjunct/disjunct and mirativity What is peculiar and, at first blush, inexplicable about Lhasa Tibetan is the semantic distinction in the copulas which form the basis of the conjunct/disjunct system. We can easily extract from the paradigm morphemes yin and yod associated with the conjunct, and red and 'dug with the disjunct. Yin and red are equational copulas, and yod and 'dug are locational/existentials (see Table 2). Table 2 Lhasa copulas
Equational Existentia]
Conjunct
Disjunct
yin yod
red 'dug
When I approached these from the point of view of evidentiality, their semantics seemed entirely mysterious. The distribution is sometimes informally described as person-based, with yin and yod used with 1st person subjects (or, more accurately, in conjunct contexts) and red and 'dug used with non-lst persons (more accurately, in disjunct contexts). Examples can be easily found, however, which disconfirm this simple hypothesis. My first Lhasa consultant, trying very hard to explain things to me, came up with minimal pairs like the following: (6) a. gza=spen=ba-la tsogs='du yod Saturday-LOC meeting exist 'There's a meeting on Saturday.' b. gza=spen=ba-la tsogs='du 'dug 'idem'. (7) a. nga-'i nang-la shmi yod I-GEN house-LOC cat exist 'There's a cat in my house.' b. nga-'i nang-la shmi 'dug 'idem.' In each pair, there is a semantic distinction which certainly cannot be described in terms of anything that I had previously learned about. In the first pair, the difference is that (6a) would be said by someone who had been involved in planning the meeting; (6b) would be said by someone who had simply heard it announced. This difference sounds reasonably evidential; it could easily be interpreted as the difference between first-hand knowledge and hearsay. But the second pair cannot be interpreted evidentially; both sentences would be appropriately uttered by someone walking into his house and seeing a cat there. My consultant explained that the difference is that (7a) is what I would say if the cat were mine, while (7b) would be appropriate if it were a strange cat. Indeed, we can find pairs where, in the most likely contexts, the
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evidential values are reversed. For example, 1 could say (8a) in an answer to someone asking me whether I own a particular book, even if I have not seen my own copy in years. On the other hand, (8b) is what I would say if, after having sincerely said to my interlocutor that I did not have the book, I returned home and found it on my shelf:
(8) a. nga-r
deb de yod I-LOC book that exist 'I have that book.' b. nga-r deb de 'dug 'idem.'
The distinction which is marked here has been labeled 'specificity' by Goldstein (1991, first published 1973). While both forms can be used to report knowledge obtained by direct perception, the forms which i have labeled 'disjunct' are used when a specific instance of direct perception is the speaker's sole basis for the statement. According to Goldstein (1991: 30): "The 'dug verb is generally used when one has first-hand knowledge, but, and this is important, it also conveys 'specificity.' Specificityrefers to the fact that 'dug is used with respect to knowledge deriving from a specific situation or state in contrast to general usual, or commonlyknown situations or states." Shortly after this I heard Slobin and Aksu's first report of their work on the famous Turkish -mi.~ (Slobin and Aksu, 1982; see also Aksu-Koq and Slobin, 1986), and I began to recognize that I was dealing with a similar category. As in Turkish, so in Tibetan the notion of mirativity is entwined with that of evidentiality. However, the Tibetan system is considerably more complex, and thus the mirative and evidential strands can be disentangled in a way they cannot easily be in Turkish, where we are dealing with only a single morpheme. An examination of the Lhasa paradigm (Table 1) shows that the mirative distinction which underlies the conjunctdisjunct system derives from the copulas, while the purely evidential forms -song and -bzhag, which occur in the perfective system, represent additions from outside the copular paradigm (-song is an old suppletive perfective form of the verb 'go'; bzhag is a grammaticalization of a verb meaning 'put (away)'; see DeLancey, 1991). However, if we approach the analysis of the overall system from the elaborated verb paradigm, it has a distinctly evidential flavor. If we begin from the analysis of the copulas, we can see that the paradigm is built on a fundamentally mirative distinction, with evidentiality as a secondary and somewhat independent addition. I have since encountered another Himalayan Tibeto-Burman language, Sunwar, in which a mirative distinction in the copular system takes on evidential trappings as the copulas are imported into the verbal system (DeLancey, 1992b, 1997).
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4. Mirativity in Hare At about the same time, in 1982, I had the opportunity to do a summer's fieldwork on Hare, an Athapaskan language of the Northwest Territories. 2 I was beginning to feel like I was getting a hand on the Tibetan evidential system, and had just presented some of my data at the Chafe and Nichols Evidentials Symposium (DeLancey, 1986), where I had also, of course, heard endless details about evidential systems all over the world. So I was inspired to look for evidentials in any new language I encountered. While the grammatical category of evidentiality does not figure largely in discussions of Athapaskan, several early descriptions by Goddard (1905, 1912, 1917) mention what appears to be evidential marking in the sentencefinal particle system of some Athapaskan languages. Inspired by these, I took a short field trip in an attempt to search for evidential marking in Hare (for more detail see DeLancey, 1990b). I attempted to elicit evidentials by asking for translations of sentences, explicitly indicating the desired evidential status. That is, I asked how one would say 'there was a bear here' if one's evidence for the statement were the observation of bear tracks rather than direct visual perception - a context which, in Tibetan, would require an inferential construction. This strategy was not particularly successful, but eventually, by dint of much coaxing, I was able to elicit the following pair, where the sentence with the final particle could be used if the speaker has just come out of the house in the morning and finds bear tracks around the door: (9)
jtlhye sa k'fnayeda hereabout bear sg.go.around/3sg subj/PERF 'There was a bear walking around here.' (10) jfihye sa k'fnayeda 16 'I see there was a bear walking around here.' These, then, appear to show a standard evidential pattern of marking a statement as based on inference rather than on direct perception. Further elicitation confirmed that 16 could be used in a typical range of contexts involving non-direct information sources. There were problems with this analysis, however. One was the apparent connection, confirmed by my informants, between this particle 16 and the conversational particle hal6, which serves as a generalized response to statements on the part of others. While the semantics of a system in which the hearer responds to statements by the speaker with a marker of inferentiality are manageable, the pragmatics seemed a bit sticky (I will return to this question later on). But the most troubling problem was the difficulty which I encountered in eliciting the form; certainly in Tibetan, and to my best knowledge, in any typical evidential marking language, a speaker would quickly respond to the contexts which I was Hare is a dialect of Slavey, which, in turn, is one of several closely related dialects or languages of the Northwest Territories, all of which are referred to by their speakers as Dene.
presenting with an evidential distinction. But with my Hare consultants, just giving someone an inferential context out of the blue didn’t elicit a sentence with 15. The eliciting context needed to have the extra sense that this evidence is the only way I would ever have suspected this fact. Having once realized that, I found I could easily elicit examples with Ifi. I soon discovered even clearer evidence that the semantics of 16 are not those of a true evidential. The first examples that I found in connected texts could not be interpreted as inferential or hearsay. In the first narrative text that I coilected, the hero, Egadekini, has been sitting up in a tree throwing branches down on an ogre who has been hunting for him. The ogre finally looks up and sees him and says: (11) heee, glihde daweda! ch’ifi dach’ida lo! sitting hey upthere sgsit/3sg/IMPF guy ‘Heey, (he’s) sitting up there! The guy is sitting up there!. This sentence clearly reports direct perception on the part of the speaker, who is also the protagonist and main viewpoint character. The aspect of the context which licenses the particle 16 is not indirect perception but the sudden (direct) perception of an unexpected fact. This use of 16 turned out to be much easier to elicit, especially with imperfective aspect. For example, a sentence like ( 12): (12) Mary ewe’ ghlilayeda I6 workllis subj/IMPF ‘Mary is working on hides.’ would most plausibly occur in the context where the speaker had no previous inkling of the situation, and has just gone to Mary’s house and found her working on a hide. That is, (12) is most likely to occur in a context where the speaker does have firsthand knowledge, but the information is entirely new and perhaps unexpected. One characteristic of the use of 16, which became evident as I started to let my consult~ts provide examples rather than trying to force them myself, is to be found in sentences with second person actor. These virtually always have the sense of surprise at an unanticipated situation (since, after all, a statement about the addressee is generally ConversationalIy relevant only if it is new information to the speaker). An example is (13), for which it is impossible to construct an acceptable context implying inference or hearsay, since the verb form indicates that the working is going on while the speaker is speaking, and thus apparent to her: (13) ewe’ ghalayida 16 workl2s subj/IMPF ‘I see you’re working on hides!’ Spontaneous exampIes provided by my informants were strikingly reminiscent of Slobin and Aksu’s (1982; Aksu-Koc and Slobin, 1986) discussion of the
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Turkish mirative perfect mi,~, down to such odd details as its use with complimentary force: (14) deshita yedanfyie 16 bush be.smart/2s subj/IMPF 'You're smart for the bush!' (i.e., you are competent at bushcraft, and good at improvising when in the wild) This would be said to someone who has just demonstrated more bush knowledge than the speaker thought he or she had. This could, presumably, be interpreted as easily as inferential, as an example of the 'new knowledge' sense, since a person's capabilities can logically be known only by inference from an actual performance. However, the new knowledge sense seems to be what is most prominent, as one consultant put it, "16 is there because you didn't know".
5. Notes on mirativity in Hare and English What Hare contributes to the present discussion is an example of relatively 'pure' mirativity - an independent distinction unrelated to an evidential paradigm. Still, as we can see from the data discussed, there is a remaining flavor of inferentiality clinging to the Hare mirative particle. Although, as I have tried to do, it is possible to explain the evidential effects associated with some uses of 16 as deriving from its essential mirative sense, it is still the case that, as with Turkish miig, the form can also be interpreted as a sort of mixed evidential/mirative category. There is, however, readily available evidence from a more familiar language of a truly pure mirative category. Mirativity is not dire=tly expressed in the morphosyntactic system of English, although as pointed out by Akatsuka (1985; cf. DeLancey, 1997), it exists as a covert semantic category. However, it can be marked intonationally. The mirative intonation contour is an exaggerated version of the declarative intonation, with the tonic rise considerably higher. This intonation contour has the same general functional range as the mirative constructions that we have been examining, extending even to the complimentary sense. Commenting on a friend's child's performance at a piano recital, one would far more likely make a complimentary comment (e.g., She plays really well) with the mirative intonational contour than with ordinary statement intonation. This intonational contour has nothing whatever of the evidential about it. If one should ask an informant why they used this intonation pattern in a particular utterance, the answer will never have anything to do with source of information, but only with its novelty and the speaker's reaction to that. There is a very interesting parallel between this English intonational form and the Hare mirative. As I noted earlier, the attention noise (or 'minimal positive response' - - the polite response to being told something, the sound of encouragement to a narrator, the sound that a listener makes periodically as feedback to the speaker) in Hare is halO, explicitly identified by speakers with the mirative particle. In American English, the attention noise (typically an affirmative grunt, or sometimes the abbreviated
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affirmative yeah) is most commonly uttered with a slightly rising intonation contour, or with the simple declarative pattern. But a considerable (and perhaps growing) number of speakers, particularly in polite register, use the mirative contour instead. This is, of course, exactly the same extension of use of mirative marking as we find in Hare. The motivation for the extension is easy to understand: What this does is to politely indicate that what one is being told is indeed informative - easily taken by the speaker as conveying the flattering message that everything she is saying is new and interesting.
6. Mirativity, evidentiality, and aspect There is a well-known overlap between the expression of mirativity and an inferential evidential category, particularly well attested in languages of southeastern Europe and western Asia. In general, we seem to be dealing here with originally perfect or perfective constructions, which have acquired a reading combining inferential evidential status and mirativity. These are Guentch6va's (1996a: 12) 'formes construites '~ partir du parfait', for which she lists as examples Albanian, Western Armenian, Bulgarian, Georgian, Macedonian, Persian, Tadzhik, Turkish, and Nepali. There is a simple diachronic path which would produce this cluster of functions associated with a single form. The association between a perfect construction and an inferential, which marks a proposition as known to the speaker through direct perception of the results of an event, is fairly obvious (see e.g., Comrie, 1976; DeLancey, 1981; Anderson, 1982). The perfect describes an event as in the past relative to the moment of speech, but nevertheless relevant in the present, i.e., most typically an event which is finished but which has lasting consequences perceptible at the time of speech. It requires only a minor pragmatic reanalysis of the construction for it to come to apply specifically to events whose occurrence is known to the speaker only through perception of those lasting consequences (for a case study explicating this path of reanalysis, see Genetti, 1986). As ! have suggested earlier, this sense already has some connection to the notion of mirativity. An expected event is expected on the basis of previous knowledge or perception of a chain of events leading up to it - a fact which one knows only when one sees secondary evidence for it is necessarily unexpected to some degree. On the other hand, there is evidence for development in the opposite direction, i.e., for a fundamentally mirative construction to acquire an inferential interpretation when combined with perfective aspect. As noted by Ko (1989; see DeLancey, 1997), the mirative, by definition, is restricted to contexts in which the speaker's discovery of the reported fact is relatively recent. Once one has known something for a certain length of time, it can no longer be considered new or unexpected. This results in a loose association between mirativity and imperfectivity, as demonstrated for Hare (see above), Sunwar, and Korean in DeLancey (1997). Similarly, Nichols (1986) describes an evidential particle in Chinese Pidgin Russian which automatically has inferential force with an inherently perfective verb, but mirative (Nichols' 'immediate') force with a non-punctual verb in present tense. And as Lazard (1996:
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29) points out, in Tadzhik, the inferential can have a typical mirative sense ('le m6diatif de constation inattendue') when it occurs in the imperfective. I argued above that the inferential sense, which sometimes attaches to the Hare mirative particle, need not be considered a full-fledged evidential. The frequent inferential sense can be taken as simply reflecting the fact that an event which is known to the speaker only by evidence of its aftermath is normally something about which the speaker has no prior knowledge, and thus qualifies for inferential marking. (Cf. Goldstein's 1991 remark, quoted above, on the 'specificity' of the Tibetan mirative 'dug). The implication of this, however, is that there will be a pragmatic implication of inferentiality when a mirative construction occurs with a perfective predication. If an event is already over, and the speaker was aware of it when it happened, it is likely to have already begun to lose its novelty in the speaker's mind, and thus its eligibility for mirative marking. A past event will typically qualify for mirative marking only if the speaker has only recently become aware of it, which implies that the speaker has only indirect or secondary evidence of it.
7. Mirativity and evidentiality Languages like Hare and English provide evidence that a mirative distinction can exist independently of an evidential system. Thus it is not the case that mirativity can be thought of simply as a variant form or subsystem of evidentiality. The wellattested overlap of mirativity and inferential marking does not seem to reflect any underlying unity of mirativity and evidentiality. Rather, we have seen that it derives more-or-less automatically from the interaction between mirativity and aspect. Moreover, the two categories appear to be logically distinct, though it is not clear a priori that the logic by which they can be distinguished is necessarily identical to the psychological and social considerations which are reflected in grammatical categories like evidentiality, mirativity, and modality. 2 At a more abstract level, evidentiality and mirativity, as well as modality, can be thought of as conceptually related. Each represents the grammatical indexation of ways in which a proposition can deviate from an ideal of knowledge. The unmarked form in an evidential system typically represents information which the speaker knows from first-hand, visual perception. Propositions conveying information obtained by other means (aural perception, hearsay, or inference) are marked for source of evidence. Mirativity marks whether the information represents knowledge which is new to the speaker, or knowledge which is already integrated into the speaker's picture of the world. Typically the mirative, indicating new or unexpected
z Cf. Chafe and Nichols' (1986: vii) characterizationof the general subject of our inquiry as "'natural epistemology', the ways in which ordinary people unhampered by philosophical traditions, naturally regard the source and reliability of their knowledge" (emphasis added). It is often difficult, but always essential, for linguists to be aware of how both the philosophical tradition in which we have been educated, and the general Western folk theory of knowledge which both underlies and derives from it, may skew our thinking about semantic and pragmatic categories of natural language.
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information, is the m a r k e d category, and old or integrated information is presented in the u n m a r k e d clause type. In a l a n g u a g e such as English with a g r a m m a t i c a l i z e d system o f m o d a l i t y , the u n m a r k e d c a t e g o r y represents k n o w l e d g e which the s p e a k e r presents with c o m p l e t e c o n f i d e n c e o f its truth. Deviations from this level o f certainty are m a r k e d by appropriate e x p o n e n t s o f the m o d a l system. F r o m these w i d e s p r e a d patterns, we can infer an ideal k n o w l e d g e status and treat these g r a m m a t i c a l categories as devices for m a r k i n g various kinds o f deviation from this status. The u n m a r k e d k n o w l e d g e status is a p r o p o s i t i o n which is k n o w n by the speaker by direct experience, is a s s u m e d to be certainly true, and is fully consistent with the rest o f the s p e a k e r ' s k n o w l e d g e o f the world. Evidentiality, mirativity, and m o d a l i t y represent devices for m a r k i n g a p r o p o s i t i o n as failing to m e e t one o f these criteria. F r o m this perspective, it is hardly surprising to find interaction and o v e r l a p a m o n g these categories as they are e x p r e s s e d in languages. In particular, we need not be surprised that forms from one k i n d o f system d e v e l o p functions o f another, as when evidential senses d e v e l o p e d into f u n d a m e n t a l l y mirative constructions, (and see m y c o m m e n t on m o d a l s at the beginning o f this paper). But we also need not take such d e v e l o p m e n t s as e v i d e n c e for the fundamental non-distinctness o f the categories involved.
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DeLancey, Scott, 1992a. The historical status of the conjunct/disjunct pattern in Tibeto-Burman. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 25: 39~52. DeLancey, Scott, 1992b. Sunwar copulas. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 15:31-38. DeLancey, Scott, 1997. Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information. Linguistic Typology 1: 33-52. Dickinson, Connie, forthcoming. Mirativity in Tsafiki. Studies in Language. Genetti, Carol, 1986. The grammaticalization of the Newari verb tol. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 9: 53-70. Goddard, Pliny Earle, 1905. The morphology of the Hupa language. (University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 3.) Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Goddard, Pliny Earle, 1912. Elements of the Kato language. (University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 11 (1). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Goddard, Pliny Earle, 1917. Texts and analysis of Cold Lake dialect, Chipewyan. (Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 10, pts. 1-2.) New York: American Museum of Natural History. Goldstein, Melvyn, 1991. Essentials of Modern Literary Tibetan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Orig. 1973. Modern Literary Tibetan. (Occ. Papers of the Wolfenden Society on TibetoBurman Linguistics V.). Urbana, IL: Center for Asian Studies, University of Illinois. Guentch6va, Zlatka, 1996a. Introduction. In: Z. Guentch6va, ed., 11-I 8. Guentch6va, Zlatka, ed., 1996b. L'l~nonciation m6diatis6e. Paris: Peeters. Hale, Austin, 1980. Person markers: Finite conjunct and disjunct verb forms in Newari. In: R. Trail, ed., Papers in South-East Asian linguistics 7, 95-106. (Pacific Linguistics Series A, No. 53.) Canberra: Department of Linguistics, Australian National University. Hargreaves, David, 1991. The concept of intentional action in the grammar of Kathmandu Newari. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oregon. Jacobsen, William. 1964. A grammar of the Washo language. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Jacobsen, William, 1986. The heterogeneity of evidentials in Makah. In: W. Chafe and J. Nichols, eds., 3-28. Jin, Peng, 1979. Lun Zangyu Lasa koyu dongcide tedian yu yufa jiegoude guanxi (On the relations between the characteristics of the verb and the syntactic structure in Spoken Tibetan (Lhasa dialect)). Minzu Yuwen 3: 173-181. Ko, Kyounghee, 1989. The integrated/new knowledge markers in Korean. M.A. thesis, University of Oregon. Lazard, Gilbert, 1996. Le m6diatif en persan. In: Z. Guentch6va, ed., 21-30. Lazard, Gilbert, 1999. Mirativity, evidentiality, mediativity, or other? Linguistic Typology 3: 91-109. Lazard, Gilbert, this volume. On the grammaticalization of evidentiality. Leinonen, Marja, forthcoming. Evidentiality in Komi Zyryan. In: B. Utas and L. Johanson, eds., Evidentials: Turkic, Iranian, and neighboring languages. Nichols, Johanna, 1986. The bottom line: Chinese Pidgin Russian. In: W. Chafe and J. Nichols, eds., 239-257. Plungian, Vladimir A., this volume. The place of evidentiality within the universal grammatical space. Slater, Keith, 1996. Evidentiality in Minhe Monguor and the conjunct/disjunct system: Language contact on the inner Asian frontier. Ms., Department of Linguistics, University of California at Santa Barbara. Slobin, Dan and Ayhan Aksu, 1982. Tense, aspect, modality, and more in Turkish evidentials. In: P. Hopper, ed., Tense-aspect: Between semantics and pragmatics, 185-200. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Sun, Jackson Tianshin, 1993. Evidentials in Amdo Tibetan. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 63: 945-1001. Tournadre, Nicolas, 1996. Comparaison des syst~mes m~diatifs de quatre dialects tib6tains (tibdtain central, ladakhi, dzongkha et amdo). In: Z. Guentch6va, ed., 195-213. Watters, David, 1998a. The Kham language of West-Central Nepal (Takale dialect). Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oregon.
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Watters, David, 1998b. Mirativity in Kham, Ms., Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon. Woodbury, Anthony, 1986. Interactions of tense and evidentiality: A study of Sherpa and English. In: W. Chafe and J. Nichols, eds., 188-202.
Scott DeLancey is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Oregon. His research interests include cognitive bases of linguistic structure, grammaticalization, Tibeto-Burman languages, and languages of western North America.
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I
www.elsevier.nl/locate/pragma
The mirative and evidentiality Scott D e L a n c e y *
Department of Linguistics, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA Abstract
Evidentiality refers to the grammatical marking of the source of evidence for a proposition; mirativity refers to the marking of a proposition as representing information which is new to the speaker. Mirativity has sometimes been thought of as part of the larger category of evidentiality. Based on evidence from Tibetan, Hare, and other languages, it is argued here that mirativity must be recognized as a distinct semantic and grammatical category. The existence in many languages of a form which combines mirative and inferential readings can be explained in terms of the interaction of mirativity and aspect: The combination of mirative marking and perfective aspect will naturally tend to be interpreted as inferential, since an event in the past will ordinarily be new information to the speaker only if his or her knowledge of it derives from secondary evidence rather than from direct perception. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Evidentiality; Mirative; Mirativity; Modality; Tibetan; Athabaskan
1. I n t r o d u c t i o n
Recent work has established the existence in a broad range of languages of an evidential-like category which is used to mark both hearsay or inference and certain kinds of first-hand knowledge (DeLancey, 1997). The mirative or admirative has a respectable history of recognition in Balkan linguistics, and has occasionally been noted elsewhere (see Jacobsen, 1964, 1986, on the North American language Washo). Only recently, however, has it begun to be recognized as a widespread phenomenon rather than a local peculiarity, and considerable new documentation of mirative systems is appearing (Leinonen, forthcoming; Slater, 1996; Dickinson, forthcoming; Watters, 1998a,b). The term 'mirativity' refers to the linguistic marking
*
E-mail: [email protected]
0378-2166/01/$ - see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0378-2166(00)00008-4
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of an utterance as conveying information which is new or unexpected to the speaker. The nature of the category will become clearer as we discuss examples later. Mirative forms often intersect both semantically and paradigmatically with evidential systems. Where mirative constructions have been recognized in the past, they have often been considered simply an odd appendage to evidentiality (see, for example, Guentch6va, 1996a: 13). While acknowledging the importance of the mirative semantic component in various evidential systems, Lazard (1999, this volume) points out that throughout the Balkan-West Asian evidentiality belt, mirativity and evidentiality are entwined in a single system. He argues against recognizing mirativity as a grammatical phenomenon distinct from evidentiality. The attested connection between these categories is important, and we need to understand it better. At the same time, there is a clear logical distinction between mirativity and evidentiality, and in some languages expressions of mirativity can be found which have no grammatical connection to any evidential system. My primary purpose in this paper is to discuss reasons for treating mirativity as an independent phenomenon distinct from evidentiality, though I do this without denying that there is good evidence for a close relationship between the two categories.
2. The question of categories There has been much discussion in the literature of the issue of distinguishing semantic and grammatical categories like evidentiality, modality, and mirativity. Mirative forms, as I have noted, are often treated by linguists as exponents of the general category of evidentiality. Clearly, for example, the languages discussed by Lazard (this volume) provide good linguistic evidence that, as he puts it, inference, hearsay, and 'constatation inattendue', i.e., direct perception of one's own unintended and unexpected actions, constitute some kind of unified category. It is often argued that the category of evidentiality has intimate links with that of modality. Linguistic evidence for this claim is readily available (see Plungian, this volume). Consider, for instance, the clearly evidential reading of certain uses of English must, as when we say of someone who has failed to show up when expected: (1) He must have gotten lost. Nevertheless, we can have modal systems which do not express evidentiality, and evidential systems which are in no legitimate sense modal. I will also present evidence that we can find expressions of mirativity which are not evidential in the sense that the systems which Lazard discusses clearly are. There is an important question here, more fundamental than the simple problem of categorization of linguistic structures. Whatever their linguistic expression, categories like evidentiality are ultimately semantic in definition. A fundamental tenet of functionalist linguistics is that languages express in their grammars those semantic and pragmatic categories for which their speakers have a frequent and regular need. The obvious implication is that categories which are widespread in the world's languages
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express semantic and pragmatic functions which are universal in human cognition and communication. Put in phenomenological terms, the fundamental communicative function of language is to provide the speaker with tools with which to guide a hearer in constructing an experiential representation. The categories which we consistently find in language are means of representing universal aspects of human experience. Much research in semantics and pragmatics has assumed an objectivist view of truth and human knowledge stemming from a belief that the structure of language must reflect some version of formal logic. It is abundantly clear, however, that this deductive approach is inadequate, and that neither human language nor natural human cognition can be completely described in these terms. Research into the nature and interrelations of the categories expressed in human language is, in fact, inductive empirical research into the structure of human thought. And, thus, the question whether evidentiality is a form of modality or a distinct category, or whether mirativity is a subcategory of evidentiality, are of substantial importance.
3. Mirativity and evidentiality in Lhasa Tibetan I first became aware of the phenomenon of mirativity when I was trying to untangle the marking of evidentiality and volition in the Lhasa Tibetan verb paradigm. If we look only at clauses in perfective aspect with third person arguments, Lhasa shows what looks like a fairly typical evidential system, distinguishing knowledge obtained through direct perception of the event, through direct perception of a state resulting from the event, and indirectly (DeLancey, 1985, 1986, 1990a, 1992a; for related discussion see also Jin, 1979; Woodbury, 1986; Sun, 1993; Agha, 1993; Tournadre, 1996): (2) blo=bzang-gis thang=kha bkal-song P.N.-ERG thangka hang-PERF/DIRECT 'Lobsang hung up a thangka (religious painting).' (direct perception) (3) blo=bzang-gis thang=kha bkal-bzhag -PERF/INFERENTIAL 'idem.' (inference from direct knowledge of a subsequent state, e.g., the speaker sees firsthand that the thangka has been hung) (4) blo=bzang-gis thang=kha bkal-pa red -PERF/INDIRECT 'idem.' (hearsay, inference, or general knowledge) With first person subject (or questions with second person subject, see below), however, there is an additional distinction which reflects volitionality rather than evidentiality per se: (5) a. nga-s kho dbril-pa yin I-ERG he knock.down-PERF/CONJUNCT 'I knocked him down.' (intentionally)
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b. nga-s kho dbril-song -PERF/DIRECT 'I knocked him down.' (unintentionally) Note that the form which with first person subject indicates non-volitionality is the same as that which with third person indicates direct knowledge on the part of the speaker. 3.1. The 'conjunct/disjunct' pattern
Several alternations in the Tibetan verbal system are sensitive to the distinction between statements with a first person argument (almost always subject, except for one construction which we will not deal with here; see DeLancey, 1984), questions with a second person, and all other sentences. This is the most elaborate example that I know of the 'conjunct/disjunct' (Hale, 1980) or '6gophorique' (Tournadre, 1996) pattern, which has been noted in a few other Tibeto-Burman languages (DeLancey, 1992a) and, as far as I know, in only two non-Tibeto-Burman languages (see Dickinson, forthcoming; Slater, 1996). Roughly speaking, conjunct forms occur with first person subjects in statements and second person subjects in questions which refer to an intentional act. I have argued that this distinction can be interpreted as part of the evidential system, where the conjunct forms represent the speaker's direct perception of the act of volition which leads to an action, and the disjunct form represents its absence (DeLancey, 1985, 1986, 1990a; see also Hargreaves, 1991). Since only the perpetrator of an act can possibly have direct knowledge of the act of volition which led to it, this distinction can be made only in statements with first person actor and in questions with second person actor. This distinction (but not the purely evidential one) also occurs in the imperfect and future; the forms are laid out in Table 1. Table 1 The Lhasa tense/aspect/evidentialitysystem No direct knowledge
Perfective Imperfective Future
-pa red =gi yod-pa red =gi red
Direct knowledgeof Volition (conjunct)
Event (disjunct)
Resultant state
-pa yin =gi yod =gi yin
-song =gi ('dug)
-zhag
While, as an evidential system, the Lhasa verbal paradigm has some very atypical features, they can reasonably be integrated into an interpretation of the system as an evidential system.
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3.2. Conjunct/disjunct and mirativity What is peculiar and, at first blush, inexplicable about Lhasa Tibetan is the semantic distinction in the copulas which form the basis of the conjunct/disjunct system. We can easily extract from the paradigm morphemes yin and yod associated with the conjunct, and red and 'dug with the disjunct. Yin and red are equational copulas, and yod and 'dug are locational/existentials (see Table 2). Table 2 Lhasa copulas
Equational Existentia]
Conjunct
Disjunct
yin yod
red 'dug
When I approached these from the point of view of evidentiality, their semantics seemed entirely mysterious. The distribution is sometimes informally described as person-based, with yin and yod used with 1st person subjects (or, more accurately, in conjunct contexts) and red and 'dug used with non-lst persons (more accurately, in disjunct contexts). Examples can be easily found, however, which disconfirm this simple hypothesis. My first Lhasa consultant, trying very hard to explain things to me, came up with minimal pairs like the following: (6) a. gza=spen=ba-la tsogs='du yod Saturday-LOC meeting exist 'There's a meeting on Saturday.' b. gza=spen=ba-la tsogs='du 'dug 'idem'. (7) a. nga-'i nang-la shmi yod I-GEN house-LOC cat exist 'There's a cat in my house.' b. nga-'i nang-la shmi 'dug 'idem.' In each pair, there is a semantic distinction which certainly cannot be described in terms of anything that I had previously learned about. In the first pair, the difference is that (6a) would be said by someone who had been involved in planning the meeting; (6b) would be said by someone who had simply heard it announced. This difference sounds reasonably evidential; it could easily be interpreted as the difference between first-hand knowledge and hearsay. But the second pair cannot be interpreted evidentially; both sentences would be appropriately uttered by someone walking into his house and seeing a cat there. My consultant explained that the difference is that (7a) is what I would say if the cat were mine, while (7b) would be appropriate if it were a strange cat. Indeed, we can find pairs where, in the most likely contexts, the
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evidential values are reversed. For example, 1 could say (8a) in an answer to someone asking me whether I own a particular book, even if I have not seen my own copy in years. On the other hand, (8b) is what I would say if, after having sincerely said to my interlocutor that I did not have the book, I returned home and found it on my shelf:
(8) a. nga-r
deb de yod I-LOC book that exist 'I have that book.' b. nga-r deb de 'dug 'idem.'
The distinction which is marked here has been labeled 'specificity' by Goldstein (1991, first published 1973). While both forms can be used to report knowledge obtained by direct perception, the forms which i have labeled 'disjunct' are used when a specific instance of direct perception is the speaker's sole basis for the statement. According to Goldstein (1991: 30): "The 'dug verb is generally used when one has first-hand knowledge, but, and this is important, it also conveys 'specificity.' Specificityrefers to the fact that 'dug is used with respect to knowledge deriving from a specific situation or state in contrast to general usual, or commonlyknown situations or states." Shortly after this I heard Slobin and Aksu's first report of their work on the famous Turkish -mi.~ (Slobin and Aksu, 1982; see also Aksu-Koq and Slobin, 1986), and I began to recognize that I was dealing with a similar category. As in Turkish, so in Tibetan the notion of mirativity is entwined with that of evidentiality. However, the Tibetan system is considerably more complex, and thus the mirative and evidential strands can be disentangled in a way they cannot easily be in Turkish, where we are dealing with only a single morpheme. An examination of the Lhasa paradigm (Table 1) shows that the mirative distinction which underlies the conjunctdisjunct system derives from the copulas, while the purely evidential forms -song and -bzhag, which occur in the perfective system, represent additions from outside the copular paradigm (-song is an old suppletive perfective form of the verb 'go'; bzhag is a grammaticalization of a verb meaning 'put (away)'; see DeLancey, 1991). However, if we approach the analysis of the overall system from the elaborated verb paradigm, it has a distinctly evidential flavor. If we begin from the analysis of the copulas, we can see that the paradigm is built on a fundamentally mirative distinction, with evidentiality as a secondary and somewhat independent addition. I have since encountered another Himalayan Tibeto-Burman language, Sunwar, in which a mirative distinction in the copular system takes on evidential trappings as the copulas are imported into the verbal system (DeLancey, 1992b, 1997).
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4. Mirativity in Hare At about the same time, in 1982, I had the opportunity to do a summer's fieldwork on Hare, an Athapaskan language of the Northwest Territories. 2 I was beginning to feel like I was getting a hand on the Tibetan evidential system, and had just presented some of my data at the Chafe and Nichols Evidentials Symposium (DeLancey, 1986), where I had also, of course, heard endless details about evidential systems all over the world. So I was inspired to look for evidentials in any new language I encountered. While the grammatical category of evidentiality does not figure largely in discussions of Athapaskan, several early descriptions by Goddard (1905, 1912, 1917) mention what appears to be evidential marking in the sentencefinal particle system of some Athapaskan languages. Inspired by these, I took a short field trip in an attempt to search for evidential marking in Hare (for more detail see DeLancey, 1990b). I attempted to elicit evidentials by asking for translations of sentences, explicitly indicating the desired evidential status. That is, I asked how one would say 'there was a bear here' if one's evidence for the statement were the observation of bear tracks rather than direct visual perception - a context which, in Tibetan, would require an inferential construction. This strategy was not particularly successful, but eventually, by dint of much coaxing, I was able to elicit the following pair, where the sentence with the final particle could be used if the speaker has just come out of the house in the morning and finds bear tracks around the door: (9)
jtlhye sa k'fnayeda hereabout bear sg.go.around/3sg subj/PERF 'There was a bear walking around here.' (10) jfihye sa k'fnayeda 16 'I see there was a bear walking around here.' These, then, appear to show a standard evidential pattern of marking a statement as based on inference rather than on direct perception. Further elicitation confirmed that 16 could be used in a typical range of contexts involving non-direct information sources. There were problems with this analysis, however. One was the apparent connection, confirmed by my informants, between this particle 16 and the conversational particle hal6, which serves as a generalized response to statements on the part of others. While the semantics of a system in which the hearer responds to statements by the speaker with a marker of inferentiality are manageable, the pragmatics seemed a bit sticky (I will return to this question later on). But the most troubling problem was the difficulty which I encountered in eliciting the form; certainly in Tibetan, and to my best knowledge, in any typical evidential marking language, a speaker would quickly respond to the contexts which I was Hare is a dialect of Slavey, which, in turn, is one of several closely related dialects or languages of the Northwest Territories, all of which are referred to by their speakers as Dene.
presenting with an evidential distinction. But with my Hare consultants, just giving someone an inferential context out of the blue didn’t elicit a sentence with 15. The eliciting context needed to have the extra sense that this evidence is the only way I would ever have suspected this fact. Having once realized that, I found I could easily elicit examples with Ifi. I soon discovered even clearer evidence that the semantics of 16 are not those of a true evidential. The first examples that I found in connected texts could not be interpreted as inferential or hearsay. In the first narrative text that I coilected, the hero, Egadekini, has been sitting up in a tree throwing branches down on an ogre who has been hunting for him. The ogre finally looks up and sees him and says: (11) heee, glihde daweda! ch’ifi dach’ida lo! sitting hey upthere sgsit/3sg/IMPF guy ‘Heey, (he’s) sitting up there! The guy is sitting up there!. This sentence clearly reports direct perception on the part of the speaker, who is also the protagonist and main viewpoint character. The aspect of the context which licenses the particle 16 is not indirect perception but the sudden (direct) perception of an unexpected fact. This use of 16 turned out to be much easier to elicit, especially with imperfective aspect. For example, a sentence like ( 12): (12) Mary ewe’ ghlilayeda I6 workllis subj/IMPF ‘Mary is working on hides.’ would most plausibly occur in the context where the speaker had no previous inkling of the situation, and has just gone to Mary’s house and found her working on a hide. That is, (12) is most likely to occur in a context where the speaker does have firsthand knowledge, but the information is entirely new and perhaps unexpected. One characteristic of the use of 16, which became evident as I started to let my consult~ts provide examples rather than trying to force them myself, is to be found in sentences with second person actor. These virtually always have the sense of surprise at an unanticipated situation (since, after all, a statement about the addressee is generally ConversationalIy relevant only if it is new information to the speaker). An example is (13), for which it is impossible to construct an acceptable context implying inference or hearsay, since the verb form indicates that the working is going on while the speaker is speaking, and thus apparent to her: (13) ewe’ ghalayida 16 workl2s subj/IMPF ‘I see you’re working on hides!’ Spontaneous exampIes provided by my informants were strikingly reminiscent of Slobin and Aksu’s (1982; Aksu-Koc and Slobin, 1986) discussion of the
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Turkish mirative perfect mi,~, down to such odd details as its use with complimentary force: (14) deshita yedanfyie 16 bush be.smart/2s subj/IMPF 'You're smart for the bush!' (i.e., you are competent at bushcraft, and good at improvising when in the wild) This would be said to someone who has just demonstrated more bush knowledge than the speaker thought he or she had. This could, presumably, be interpreted as easily as inferential, as an example of the 'new knowledge' sense, since a person's capabilities can logically be known only by inference from an actual performance. However, the new knowledge sense seems to be what is most prominent, as one consultant put it, "16 is there because you didn't know".
5. Notes on mirativity in Hare and English What Hare contributes to the present discussion is an example of relatively 'pure' mirativity - an independent distinction unrelated to an evidential paradigm. Still, as we can see from the data discussed, there is a remaining flavor of inferentiality clinging to the Hare mirative particle. Although, as I have tried to do, it is possible to explain the evidential effects associated with some uses of 16 as deriving from its essential mirative sense, it is still the case that, as with Turkish miig, the form can also be interpreted as a sort of mixed evidential/mirative category. There is, however, readily available evidence from a more familiar language of a truly pure mirative category. Mirativity is not dire=tly expressed in the morphosyntactic system of English, although as pointed out by Akatsuka (1985; cf. DeLancey, 1997), it exists as a covert semantic category. However, it can be marked intonationally. The mirative intonation contour is an exaggerated version of the declarative intonation, with the tonic rise considerably higher. This intonation contour has the same general functional range as the mirative constructions that we have been examining, extending even to the complimentary sense. Commenting on a friend's child's performance at a piano recital, one would far more likely make a complimentary comment (e.g., She plays really well) with the mirative intonational contour than with ordinary statement intonation. This intonational contour has nothing whatever of the evidential about it. If one should ask an informant why they used this intonation pattern in a particular utterance, the answer will never have anything to do with source of information, but only with its novelty and the speaker's reaction to that. There is a very interesting parallel between this English intonational form and the Hare mirative. As I noted earlier, the attention noise (or 'minimal positive response' - - the polite response to being told something, the sound of encouragement to a narrator, the sound that a listener makes periodically as feedback to the speaker) in Hare is halO, explicitly identified by speakers with the mirative particle. In American English, the attention noise (typically an affirmative grunt, or sometimes the abbreviated
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affirmative yeah) is most commonly uttered with a slightly rising intonation contour, or with the simple declarative pattern. But a considerable (and perhaps growing) number of speakers, particularly in polite register, use the mirative contour instead. This is, of course, exactly the same extension of use of mirative marking as we find in Hare. The motivation for the extension is easy to understand: What this does is to politely indicate that what one is being told is indeed informative - easily taken by the speaker as conveying the flattering message that everything she is saying is new and interesting.
6. Mirativity, evidentiality, and aspect There is a well-known overlap between the expression of mirativity and an inferential evidential category, particularly well attested in languages of southeastern Europe and western Asia. In general, we seem to be dealing here with originally perfect or perfective constructions, which have acquired a reading combining inferential evidential status and mirativity. These are Guentch6va's (1996a: 12) 'formes construites '~ partir du parfait', for which she lists as examples Albanian, Western Armenian, Bulgarian, Georgian, Macedonian, Persian, Tadzhik, Turkish, and Nepali. There is a simple diachronic path which would produce this cluster of functions associated with a single form. The association between a perfect construction and an inferential, which marks a proposition as known to the speaker through direct perception of the results of an event, is fairly obvious (see e.g., Comrie, 1976; DeLancey, 1981; Anderson, 1982). The perfect describes an event as in the past relative to the moment of speech, but nevertheless relevant in the present, i.e., most typically an event which is finished but which has lasting consequences perceptible at the time of speech. It requires only a minor pragmatic reanalysis of the construction for it to come to apply specifically to events whose occurrence is known to the speaker only through perception of those lasting consequences (for a case study explicating this path of reanalysis, see Genetti, 1986). As ! have suggested earlier, this sense already has some connection to the notion of mirativity. An expected event is expected on the basis of previous knowledge or perception of a chain of events leading up to it - a fact which one knows only when one sees secondary evidence for it is necessarily unexpected to some degree. On the other hand, there is evidence for development in the opposite direction, i.e., for a fundamentally mirative construction to acquire an inferential interpretation when combined with perfective aspect. As noted by Ko (1989; see DeLancey, 1997), the mirative, by definition, is restricted to contexts in which the speaker's discovery of the reported fact is relatively recent. Once one has known something for a certain length of time, it can no longer be considered new or unexpected. This results in a loose association between mirativity and imperfectivity, as demonstrated for Hare (see above), Sunwar, and Korean in DeLancey (1997). Similarly, Nichols (1986) describes an evidential particle in Chinese Pidgin Russian which automatically has inferential force with an inherently perfective verb, but mirative (Nichols' 'immediate') force with a non-punctual verb in present tense. And as Lazard (1996:
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29) points out, in Tadzhik, the inferential can have a typical mirative sense ('le m6diatif de constation inattendue') when it occurs in the imperfective. I argued above that the inferential sense, which sometimes attaches to the Hare mirative particle, need not be considered a full-fledged evidential. The frequent inferential sense can be taken as simply reflecting the fact that an event which is known to the speaker only by evidence of its aftermath is normally something about which the speaker has no prior knowledge, and thus qualifies for inferential marking. (Cf. Goldstein's 1991 remark, quoted above, on the 'specificity' of the Tibetan mirative 'dug). The implication of this, however, is that there will be a pragmatic implication of inferentiality when a mirative construction occurs with a perfective predication. If an event is already over, and the speaker was aware of it when it happened, it is likely to have already begun to lose its novelty in the speaker's mind, and thus its eligibility for mirative marking. A past event will typically qualify for mirative marking only if the speaker has only recently become aware of it, which implies that the speaker has only indirect or secondary evidence of it.
7. Mirativity and evidentiality Languages like Hare and English provide evidence that a mirative distinction can exist independently of an evidential system. Thus it is not the case that mirativity can be thought of simply as a variant form or subsystem of evidentiality. The wellattested overlap of mirativity and inferential marking does not seem to reflect any underlying unity of mirativity and evidentiality. Rather, we have seen that it derives more-or-less automatically from the interaction between mirativity and aspect. Moreover, the two categories appear to be logically distinct, though it is not clear a priori that the logic by which they can be distinguished is necessarily identical to the psychological and social considerations which are reflected in grammatical categories like evidentiality, mirativity, and modality. 2 At a more abstract level, evidentiality and mirativity, as well as modality, can be thought of as conceptually related. Each represents the grammatical indexation of ways in which a proposition can deviate from an ideal of knowledge. The unmarked form in an evidential system typically represents information which the speaker knows from first-hand, visual perception. Propositions conveying information obtained by other means (aural perception, hearsay, or inference) are marked for source of evidence. Mirativity marks whether the information represents knowledge which is new to the speaker, or knowledge which is already integrated into the speaker's picture of the world. Typically the mirative, indicating new or unexpected
z Cf. Chafe and Nichols' (1986: vii) characterizationof the general subject of our inquiry as "'natural epistemology', the ways in which ordinary people unhampered by philosophical traditions, naturally regard the source and reliability of their knowledge" (emphasis added). It is often difficult, but always essential, for linguists to be aware of how both the philosophical tradition in which we have been educated, and the general Western folk theory of knowledge which both underlies and derives from it, may skew our thinking about semantic and pragmatic categories of natural language.
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information, is the m a r k e d category, and old or integrated information is presented in the u n m a r k e d clause type. In a l a n g u a g e such as English with a g r a m m a t i c a l i z e d system o f m o d a l i t y , the u n m a r k e d c a t e g o r y represents k n o w l e d g e which the s p e a k e r presents with c o m p l e t e c o n f i d e n c e o f its truth. Deviations from this level o f certainty are m a r k e d by appropriate e x p o n e n t s o f the m o d a l system. F r o m these w i d e s p r e a d patterns, we can infer an ideal k n o w l e d g e status and treat these g r a m m a t i c a l categories as devices for m a r k i n g various kinds o f deviation from this status. The u n m a r k e d k n o w l e d g e status is a p r o p o s i t i o n which is k n o w n by the speaker by direct experience, is a s s u m e d to be certainly true, and is fully consistent with the rest o f the s p e a k e r ' s k n o w l e d g e o f the world. Evidentiality, mirativity, and m o d a l i t y represent devices for m a r k i n g a p r o p o s i t i o n as failing to m e e t one o f these criteria. F r o m this perspective, it is hardly surprising to find interaction and o v e r l a p a m o n g these categories as they are e x p r e s s e d in languages. In particular, we need not be surprised that forms from one k i n d o f system d e v e l o p functions o f another, as when evidential senses d e v e l o p e d into f u n d a m e n t a l l y mirative constructions, (and see m y c o m m e n t on m o d a l s at the beginning o f this paper). But we also need not take such d e v e l o p m e n t s as e v i d e n c e for the fundamental non-distinctness o f the categories involved.
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Scott DeLancey is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Oregon. His research interests include cognitive bases of linguistic structure, grammaticalization, Tibeto-Burman languages, and languages of western North America.