[Lingtyp] Funny situations with epistemics

[Eric Melac]

Dear Jenneke,
That's a fun question!
I have a couple of anecdotes. One is quite vivid in my mind right now. I was talking in Tibetan about Chinese prisons, and said:
བཙོན་ཁང་དེ་ཚོ་དྲག་པོ་འདུག

btson khang de-tsho drag po ’dug

prison dem-pl harsh cop.dperc


'Those prisons are harsh.'
The Tibetan friend I was talking to said:
ཨ། ག་རེ་གནང་པ།
a ga re gnang-pa

inj what do.hon-int


'What?!! What did you do?'
What happened is that I made a mistake in my choice of evidential. Because I used the direct perception copula 'dug, my interlocutor understood that I had experienced Chinese prisons firsthand, so was wondering what I could have done to be sent to one. The form I should have used was yod red=ze (factual copula + hearsay enclitic).
All the best!
Eric
Eric Mélac
Associate professor in linguistics
Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3
https://emma.univ-montp3.fr
Le mardi 04/03/2025 14:47, Wal, G.J. van der (Jenneke) via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> a écrit :

De : Wal, G.J. van der (Jenneke) via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Envoyé le : mardi 04/03/2025 14:47
À : lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Objet : [Lingtyp] Funny situations with epistemics
Dear linguists,


I am looking for funny situations you encountered in the use and misuse of

 * Evidentials
 * Miratives
 * Egophorics
 * Epistemic modality
 * Information structure

The goal is to use these as illustrations in an online course about the broader field of epistemicity (the knowledge of speaker and addressee as expressed in the linguistically), so that participants in the course see the relevance of these markers in an engaging way.

To get us started, I share one from the SIL stories in the field [https://www.sil.org/linguistics/stories-field]:

Roger Van Otterloo tells of the time he was discussing translation with his Kifuliiru friends (Democratic Republic of Congo) and he uttered the sentence “Don’t steal from widows!” They started chuckling, and soon everyone was laughing uproariously. Roger was mystified and wondered if he’d used the wrong tone (Kifuliiru is a tonal language) or what. The Kifuliirus told him, no, the tone was fine, but what he said implied that they could steal from everyone besides widows!

Roger found out that day that the last word in Kifuliiru is the focus, the main point, of the entire sentence. So you need to say “Those widows, don’t steal-from-them.” The “from-them” is a suffix on the verb, so the last word in the sentence is now “steal.”

Looking forward to hearing your field-fun!

Thanks very much,

Jenneke


--

Dr G.J. van der Wal | she/her

Senior Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics [https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/humanities/leiden-university-centre-for-linguistics]

Office: Reuvensplaats 4, room 1.25

https://jennekevanderwal.com [https://jennekevanderwal.com/]

MapLE project: https://epistemicity.net [https://epistemicity.net/]

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