USD $49.00
Search Results
Author:
As an intriguing but little understood language group within the Tibeto-Burman family, Qiangic languages are widely reported to have evidentiality, the grammatical means of expressing information source. How does this category function in this language group? Does it show any common features across these languages? And does it have any unique properties? Drawing on data from over a dozen languages and dialects, and cast within an informative typological framework, this study is the first attempt to answer these questions. It is found that evidentiality in Qiangic languages can be classified into three broad types. The study further demonstrates that modern systems cannot be inherited from Proto-Qiangic, and it also reveals certain features of the reported evidential that seem to be typologically rare.
Author:
As an intriguing but little understood language group within the Tibeto-Burman family, Qiangic languages are widely reported to have evidentiality, the grammatical means of expressing information source. How does this category function in this language group? Does it show any common features across these languages? And does it have any unique properties? Drawing on data from over a dozen languages and dialects, and cast within an informative typological framework, this study is the first attempt to answer these questions. It is found that evidentiality in Qiangic languages can be classified into three broad types. The study further demonstrates that modern systems cannot be inherited from Proto-Qiangic, and it also reveals certain features of the reported evidential that seem to be typologically rare.
Author:
Abstract
This study is intended as a tribute to Aikhenvald’s passion and dedication to linguistic research, particularly her investigation of evidentiality. It looks at the grammatical means of expressing knowledge—evidentiality, egophoricity, and mirativity—and their semantic connections, in Munya, a language which belongs to the Qiangic branch of the Tibeto-Burman family. I broadly define evidentiality as denoting ‘source of knowledge’, egophoricity as ‘access to knowledge’, and mirativity as ‘expectation of knowledge’. The analytical framework for evidentiality is based on Aikhenvald’s work on this topic. This chapter is organized as follows: Section 1 presents background information and relevant linguistic features of Munya. Section 2 looks at evidentiality, including the direct evidential, the inferential evidential and the reported evidential. There are two egophoric markers in Munya. Section 3 discusses the one that only occurs with volitional predicates and subjects that are speech-act participants and describes the one that can occur in all environments. There is only one mirative marker in Munya, whose functions will be examined in depth in Section 4.
Author:
Abstract
This study looks at the grammatical category of evidentiality in Qiangic languages within the typological framework developed by Aikhenvald. An examination of nine Qiangic languages, with a total of sixteen dialects and varieties, shows that the evidential systems currently identified can be grouped into three categories: the Rgyalrongic type, which is characterized by a firsthand and a non-firsthand subsystem in the past tense, the Qiang type, with a visual, an inferential, and a reported evidential, and the southern Qiangic type, which consists of a direct, an inferential, and a reported and/or a quotative evidential. After comparing these systems, it is found that there is little or no conclusive evidence for them to be inherited from a proto-language, instead, they are more likely to have developed independently. The special properties of the direct evidentials and the unusual composition of the reported and quotative evidentials recurrent in several languages are also discussed.