The contribution of Tibetan to the Study of evidentiality

The first section of this talk outlines the history of research on the Lhasa Tibetan verbal system, isolating three phases: 1. pedagogical grammars that treat evidential categories as person agreement, 2. linguistics who describe the verbal system with hierarchies of binary features, 3. those who describe the semantic categories as isomorphic with morphosyntactic categories.

The second section of the talk explores how two conceptualizations 'conjunct-disjunct' and 'egophoric' were born from, or incubated within, the description of Lhasa Tibetan. I conclude both that 'conjunct-disjunct' is an unhelpful way of looking at languages ('egophoric' less so) and that, mislead by these thought patterns, typologists have consistently misused and misunderstood Tibetan evidence.