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Don’t believe in a paradigm that you haven’t manipulated yourself!
Evidentiality, speaker attitude, and admirativity in Ladakhi
- Source: Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Published under the auspices of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association, Volume 15, Issue 2, Jan 2017, p. 515 - 539
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- 08 Dec 2017
Abstract
A speaker may conceptualise a situation from three different modal ‘perspectives’: epistemic, evidential, and attitudinal. Languages differ in which of these concepts they perspectivise and how a grammaticalised concept may be extended to the other two. ‘Lesser-known’ languages tend to be misrepresented in the typological literature. E.g., the Modern Tibetic languages, including the Ladakhi dialects, are said to have grammaticalised the concept of evidentiality. However, their ‘evidential’ systems differ from the cross-linguistically acknowledged evidential systems, in that speaker attitude is co-grammaticalised and knowledge based on perception shares properties with knowledge based on inferences. DeLancey therefore claimed that these systems also encode mirativity. The starting point for the development of these typologically rather uncommon ‘evidential’ systems was a lexical marker for non-commitment (or admirativity): the auxiliary ḥdug.