Egophoricity by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Published: 2018-04-13T10:33:20+00:00

There are no i or a vowels here, but the Western Yughur system bears significant semantic similarities to those we have seen in other Amdo Sprachbund languages. Z. Chen describes the basic semantic distinction as one of ‘certainty’ (肯定 kěndìng), with the two subcategories 确切 quèqiè “definite” (=direct) and 普通 pǔtōng “normal” (=indirect). He tells us (2004: 169, my translations) that in the past tense, for example, the “definite” forms generally appear with the first person in declaratives, and indicate that an event was “eyewitnessed, experienced personally, or absolutely certain.” In contrast, the “normal” forms are used in declaratives when “an action was not eyewitnessed or there is no need to emphasize the degree of certainty.”

In contrast to Z. Chen (2004), Roos (2000: 100) refers to the more marked Western Yughur forms as “evidential” and the less marked forms as “base forms.” Roos describes the semantic function of the “evidential” form as indicating “an action that happens to the speaker without his/her controlling it … or an action that is involuntary.” 19 Despite the difference of perspective, these two authors are clearly describing a form of the direct vs. indirect distinction we have seen in other Amdo Sprachbund languages.

Roos (2000: 101) describes an additional finite category, the habitual, which does not seem to allow marking with the “evidential” suffix, which has the phonetic shape -ɣaq. Thus, like the other languages of the Amdo Sprachbund, Western Yughur seems to have exempted one of its imperfective forms from participation in the direct vs. indirect distinction.

Finally, there is Wutun (Janhunen et al. 2008; Sandman this volume), which has been heavily influenced by Bodic and Mongolic languages. Wutun also has a form of the subjective vs. objective system, which is in many ways reminiscent of the Amdo Tibetan systems described by J. Sun (1993) and Haller (2000), including the borrowing of one of the Tibetan copulas. Sandman (this volume) outlines the details of the system.

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