“Mirativity” does not exist: ḥdug in “Lhasa” Tibetan and other suspects

Abstract

Largely through the efforts of Scott DeLancey the grammatical category “mi-rative ” has gained currency in linguistics. DeLancey bases his elaboration of this category on a misunderstanding of the semantics of h dug in “Lhasa ” Ti-betan. Rather than showing “surprising information”, linguists working on Tibetan have long described h dug as a sensory evidential. Much of the evi-dence DeLancey and Aikhenvald present for mirativity in other languages is also susceptible to explanation in terms of sensory evidence or appears close to Lazard’s “mediative ” (1999) or Johanson’s “indirective ” (2000). Until an independent grammatical category for “new information ” is described in a way which precludes analysis in terms of sensory evidence or other well estab-lished evidential categories, mirativity should be excluded from the descriptive arsenal of linguistic analysis.