TESTIMONIAL EVIDENTIALITY AT EXPRESSING EMOTIONAL-EVALUATIVE INTENSION IN TIBETAN

Abstract

Modern Tibetan has a paradigm of evidential verb forms, with the help of which the speaker indicates the source of information or their access to it. The semantically marked testimonial evidentiality (which corresponds to sensory sources of information about the fact of the utterance) can be used by the speaker to implement various communicative intensions, in particular, emotional-evaluative intension. This article presents the results of a study of speaker’s expression of emotional-evaluative intension using the forms of testimonial evidentiality in Modern Literary Tibetan. The relevance of the work is based on the insufficient study of how Tibetan speakers express communicative intensions and how evidentiality is implemented in written Modern Tibetan. The analysis was carried out on a morphosyntactically marked corpus of 83,018 tokens combining 20 texts of various genres of fiction, academic and journalistic writing in Modern Tibetan. A speaker was understood as any addresser of an utterance in direct speech and first person narration parts of the text (author, literary character, lyrical subject). For the selection and analysis of utterances with an emotional-evaluative intension, contextual analysis was used, characterizing the addresser, addressee and the object of the utterance, speech situation, as well as the meaning of the verb form in the scope of the operational context. The analysis showed that when expressing emotional- evaluative intension with the help of testimonial evidentiality, the speaker emphasizes one of the aspects of the meaning of this type of evidentiality: 1) objective or perceptual lack of control over the observed action or situation by the speaker; 2) direct evidence of the fact of the utterance as a source for an unaddressed emotional state; 3) direct observation of the speaker as an evidence for assessing and validating the reliability of the reported fact. The article provides information on the evidential system of the Tibetan language and the most common communicative intensions formalized by testimonial evidentiality, as well as discusses in detail individual cases of expressing emotional-evaluative intension along with the analysis of the speaker’s communicative position and his choice of means of expression. Refs 22.